In July 2023, the City of Vancouver announced it would be pulling the plug on the Raincity Thomus Donaghy SCS, effective March 2024, just two years after it opened, finding that “this location has proven unviable” due to excessive crime and disorder impacts.

A month prior, fed-up neighbors had filed legal actions, alleging stealing, trespass and public drug use and sales had surged since the Raincity SCS opened in 2021 and promptly became “a centre point for crime and public disorder.” Petitioners noted their Yaletown district had long been full of traditional homelessness services but “nothing prepared [us] for the precipitous increase in incidents once the O[verdose] P[revention] S[ite] opened”.

Elsewhere in British Columbia, in February 2024, a harm reduction operator dropped plans to evaluate putting an SCS in Richmond, BC, after residents packed City Council hearings to object and an anti-SCS petition topped 22,000 signatures.

The 44 year old woman was killed as she’d happened past the keepSIX SCS, in the city’s Leslieville neighborhood. It soon emerged that drugs were being sold openly by dealers inside the safe injection room, some staff were getting high on the job and addicted clientele routinely swapped and sold packages and retail goods they’d stolen from neighboring residents and businesses, as management at South Riverdale Community Health Centre mostly looked the other way, according to the published account of a former site employee. In February 2024, neighbors sued, alleging the keepSIX SCS had caused the “rapid” deterioration of their neighborhood since opening, failed to follow city rules, and given rise to “the sale and use of illicit drugs, assault, theft, vandalism, property damage and trespass” and cases of clients threatening violence against neighbors. When nearby residents and businesses tried to get South Riverdale Community Health Centre to deal with these problems, management “took no steps to address them, usually citing a lack of resources or a philosophical aversion to standard institutional responses,” according to the complaint. “Unfortunately, it took a mother of two being shot for real attention to be drawn to, you know, community concerns around drug dealing, drug use, and violence” a site neighbor said.

Leaders of the Un Toit en Ville affordable housing community located opposite CACTUS Montréal SCS say the site has made their block a “crack alley” and “brought an entire ecosystem” of drug users and dealers to their “small stretch of street,” including during hours when the site is closed and people simply gather outside. Their campaign to publicize the problems so far appears to have met mostly with shrugs, with CACTUS’s president “call[ing] on residents of the area to be more tolerant,” and a mayoral official “sa[ying] there’s no obvious solution to the problem,” according to the local paper.

Elsewhere in Montreal, residents of the Sud-Ouest district were blindsided when they belatedly learned via an August 2023 news report that a “safe inhalation site” –for those who smoke fentanyl, methamphetamine or crack cocaine instead of injecting—would be opening near their homes, park and elementary school. Now, they’re petitioning to block it and accusing the social services agency behind the SCS of “gas-lighting” them by fostering the impression the facility was simply going to be housing for the formerly homeless.

Since 2018, Red Deer, a city of about 100,000, has been host to an Overdose Prevention Site, which operates out of a modular building in a downtown parking lot. In December 2023, a City Council motion was introduced to wind down the OPS by the end of next year and meantime institute a round-the-clock police presence; and, going forward, shift resources to medication-assisted treatment, more detox capacity and recovery support.

Its sponsor said Red Deer had spent at least Can$1.2 million dealing with damage associated with the site and "[i]t's become very clear to me that despite our community's very best efforts to assist the provincially run shelter and OPS in mitigating these harmful impacts, we are not trending in the right direction.” The Council voted 5-2 to pass the measure, which was advisory in nature as the site is one regulated at the provincial level.

Sandy Hill Child Care, which operated out of a church basement within blocks of three different drug consumption sites, resorted to hiring a full-time security officer to accompany its children to play in the park, “but recurring incidents have convinced staff the location is unsafe.”

At a December 2023 community meeting, Sandy Hill residents complained about a “lack of police presence especially around safe injection sites and other community services,” and spoke about how “what started out as well-intentioned health-care services has devolved into a massive crime problem.” A property manager says her apartments are effectively unrentable, plagued by break-ins and needles discarded by users turned away by the SCS across the street for lack of capacity who walk ten feet to inject on her lawn instead. The Action Sandy Hill neighborhood association is advocating for minimum distance buffer zones between sites.

In March 2024, two of Sandy Hill’s drug consumption sites announced temporary closures. Users heating up drugs to inhale them had created fumes that caused sickness for SCS staff at Somerset West Community Health Centre, while Sandy Hill Community Health Centre’s SCS was suspending operations until further notice seemingly also over staff being made dizzy and nauseous by drug fumes.

The “peer-run” site, which was operated by NANDU and consisted of a couple tents located in an empty lot amid a mixed residential/commercial area, opened under an emergency authorization issued by the provincial government that preempted any municipal review and approval. Within months, neighbors were describing being “kept up due to yelling, fighting and partying at all hours of the night,” the next-door Dairy Queen having to bar access to their bathroom and clients who “stumble out of there all high and stumble onto the highway.”

In January 2023, the city council voted 7-1 to declare the site a public nuisance, making site operators potentially liable for excess costs their property imposed on the municipality; the site shut down the following month

Nanaimo’s mayor declared the site’s closure good news for the community: “The businesses nearby had suffered terribly, The concentration of individuals who have significant issues inevitably leads to crime and fear sadly amongst the citizens.”

While operational, the ARCHES SCS was the biggest in Canada (and, likely, the world) by usage and highly unusual, if not unique, for being a very high volume SCS located in an area not traditionally regarded or treated as a skid row.

A March 2020 report commissioned by the Government of Alberta found “police calls for service around the site have increased dramatically since it opened” (up 6,000 percent), indicated “many residents believe that there is a “safe zone” for open drug use, trafficking, prostitution and related criminal activity around the Lethbridge SCS site” and quoted a member of the local police on how “the SCS is a lawless wasteland. Drugs can be readily purchased right in the parking lot.” Another study, undertaken by a researcher at the local university on behalf of the city, found that “[i]n Lethbridge, there was a statistically (in many cases) and practically (in others) significant increase in some antisocial behaviours and discarded needles near the SCS.” While there were too many confounding variables to assign all the blame, “it is not unreasonable to consider that drawing a diverse group of disenfranchised individuals with complex social and health needs into a single service…would result in a rise in antisocial behaviour and clashes with [local businesses and the community],” the study concluded.

“Controversial since it opened,” ARCHES was closed in August 2020 after an audit “revealed many financial irregularities" by management and amid outrage over crime and disorder effects.

The Safeworks SCS was supposed to be a good idea: a drug consumption site embedded within “a big health-care facility where there are lots of wraparound services.” But an analysis of police data showed “calls related to drug use, possession, trafficking and found drugs soared by 276 per cent” after it opened, and police calls of all kinds rose at triple the rate for the rest of city center Calgary. In 2021, Alberta’s government announced Safeworks was going to be shuttered and its SCS function shifted to some “more appropriate” place because, in their words, Safeworks had proved “highly disruptive to the neighbourhood”.

But in the event, the planned new location was spiked over community opposition and Safework's shutdown / relocation shelved the following year. So Safeworks remains open and, as of late 2023, its neighbors continue to suffer “a lot of extra criminal activity and drug dealers hovering about…constantly dealing with crime and disorder.”