supervised consumption
"No other sites shutting down," Recovery Alberta leaders told staff in late 2024, as the Red Deer site closure was announced. A year later, the Royal Alex Hospital site was closed. New documents reveal both closures relied on suppression and distortion of service usage data by Recovery Alberta.
Compassionate Intervention Act
Newly obtained documents reveal a hidden plan to build a drug jail in Grande Prairie, raising questions about how many additional facilities are in the works.
Health Care Crisis
Mike Parker, the president of the Alberta union that includes paramedics, reacts to reporting by Drug Data Decoded showing the Alberta government under-reports ambulance dispatches to drug toxicity by as much as 89 percent.
Health Care Crisis
The Alberta government says it has “the most transparent data reporting system in North America" for drug toxicity. In reality, internal data manipulation causes most emergency calls to go unreported.
Alberta model
Launched to government fanfare on sole-source contracts, the Digital Overdose Response System app is barely used most days and has registered just 51 ambulance dispatches over four years –– around 0.14 percent of the ministry's under-reported dispatches for opioid toxicity in that period.
Drug Data Decoded had a breakthrough year in 2025, topping 2,000 subscribers and winning an Alberta Magazine Award for drug policy coverage.
Medical carceralism
A new policy in federal prisons removes methadone and Suboxone opioid treatments, leaving only a patented once-per-month gel injection available to prisoners. A large group of experts is raising serious concerns about harms to prisoners –– and the corporate motivations behind the move.
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New documents reveal Calgary Police Service suppressed evidence of brutality by officers at the University of Calgary on May 9, 2024. Among this was camera footage from senior officers that should have been examined during an internal investigation.
The Fifth Estate is reporting that two federally commissioned expert reviews provided unanimous support for rapidly scaling up safe supply, including compassion clubs, but the government silenced the findings. Drug Data Decoded has spent eleven months investigating: who killed the expert reviews?
Convictions are on hold as the compassion club founders prepare for a Charter challenge to begin on November 24.
On October 1, Guy Felicella published an op-ed in the Calgary Herald responding to a piece written by Marshall Smith that favoured expansion of police power to address public drug use. On October 6, a defamation notice from Smith to Felicella prompted the Herald to quietly remove the story.
Justice Catherine Murray closed the trial with remarks that showed sympathy for the accused and noted the confusing behaviour of Health Canada, the Vancouver police and all other political entities during and since the 2023 arrests of Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum.
Drug Data Decoded has obtained a trove of new documents on the Calgary police chief and deputy resignations. Despite heavy redactions, they reveal a power struggle within the service fuelled by commission messaging.
ROSC Solutions Group, a top recipient of AB recovery contracts, was funded for two reports on operations of Saskatchewan recovery centres. Their outcomes are creating a new beachhead for the privatized, abstinence-focused 'recovery-oriented system of care.'
This story was written the first summer after Drug Data Decoded launched, appearing on the cover of the March 2024 Alberta Views. Since then, its conclusions and predictions have borne out. A look at some of the follow-up work on the Alberta Recovery Model.
The Alberta government confirmed it is ending My Recovery Plan, the app that ostensibly tracked recovery progress & facility wait lists. However, the app is hosted by Amazon, placing users' personal health data at the mercy of the American Cloud Act.
The question is not whether allowing access to regulated drugs is the right thing to do –– that is now confirmed. The question is whether enough collective will can be mustered to overcome the carceral bureaucracy keeping regulated drugs out of reach. DULF can do that –– with your help.
Alberta's Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction is quietly terminating its contract with a personal data-harvesting app and replacing it with a publicly-owned 'bed availability dashboard.' The move coincides with reported scrutiny of ministry spending by the Auditor General.
The Alberta government has issued a request for interested parties to participate in the procurement process for two forced abstinence detention facilities, to be located in northwest Calgary and northeast Edmonton – right beside existing carceral institutions.