Reconsidering the Alberta study of the closure of the Red Deer supervised consumption site

Supervised consumption sites (SCS) are interventions supported by decades of evidence and yet remain subject to considerable politicization. Recently, researchers from Alberta, Canada published a study in the journal Addiction that sought to assess the impacts of the closure of a SCS in Red Deer, Alberta. The study authors reported that the closure had no negative health impacts while increasing uptake of opioid agonist treatments among former clients. However, the study suffers from numerous methodological shortcomings that call the validity of the findings into question, including but not limited to issues pertaining to undisclosed service changes confounding the study findings, exposure misclassification, model assumptions, and problems related to comparator validity. Also evident are a range of undisclosed conflicts of interest involving the study authors, as well as misleading statements about the findings by the authors and organizations that produced the study. Over 25 Canadian researchers signed a retraction request letter that was rejected by the journal’s editors, as were multiple letters to the editor outlining these concerns. This case sheds further light on the challenges related to communicating the scientific record and highlights the need for more effective and impartial retraction request processes, as well as efforts to minimize instances of potential research misconduct in the drug policy space.