When the United Conservative Party (UCP) government took power in the Western Canadian province of Alberta in 2019, harm reduction was, alongside prevention, law enforcement, and treatment, one of the ‘four pillars’ created to address the state’s toxic and unregulated drug market. By this time, thousands of people were dying each year from overdoses. But things were about to get a lot worse.
How drug deaths spiralled
In 2020, the COVID pandemic closed borders, resulting in a massive rise in cost of living that forced many people into homelessness. This had two major impacts on the drug overdose crisis. First, unhoused people are at considerably higher risk of death from drug toxicity, mainly because they must constantly evade law enforcement. This means rushed doses, often taken alone, unprotected from the cold or heat.
Second, closed international borders meant less consistency and fluidity in the drug supply. This led to a historic drop in access to heroin, replaced by fentanyl – a stronger, more easily smuggled synthetic opioid. Together, these factors drove an approximate doubling in drug-related deaths, especially among working-age, Indigenous and racialised people.
Unprepared for these developments, public health systems scrambled to patch the holes. Hotels were used as housing, opioid prescribing was loosened to reduce access barriers to regulated opioids, and basic living stipends were provided to prevent homelessness.
In Alberta, these measures lasted for a while. However, they increasingly clashed with the conflicting “Alberta Recovery Model” promoted to address substance use starting in early 2020. Led by a group of BC-based, politically connected private operators who created its ‘recovery-oriented’ framework in 2018, the model aimed to ideologically shift how drug-related health and social interventions were dealt with – less harm reduction, less drug use permissiveness. It focused on a new approach to ‘recovery’, which in practice, became something both more complex and coercive.
The Alberta Recovery Model in action
No longer would ‘open-air drug use’ be tolerated in cities where homelessness had suddenly become more visible. Access to regulated opioid prescriptions would be cut back, police power would be expanded, harm reduction services like drug consumption rooms – absent from the Recovery Model – would be closed, and people who use drugs would be expected to attend ‘treatment’ programmes, with abstinence as a main outcome.
These programmes – many of which are becoming intertwined with the prison system – are largely unregulated and almost exclusively run by private operators. These contracts are kept hidden from the public eye, with the Alberta government aggressively denying freedom of information requests from journalists and media outlets, preventing serious scrutiny.
As someone who has studied the Recovery Model carefully since 2020, my perspective is informed by on-the-ground activism and close relationships with drug war survivors and frontline care workers. What I have seen echoes eugenic and carceral approaches taken to strip the rights of people who use drugs in countries we see as oppressive and authoritarian.
The Alberta Recovery Model demands billions of dollars for a constellation of unregulated, privately run abstinence-only facilities – detoxes, residential rehabs, and “recovery communities”. Some are now facing allegations of corrupt procurement.
Researchers like Elaine Hyshka at the University of Alberta tell us that if the goal is to reduce deaths, funding ‘treatment beds’ – which is shorthand for residential rehab capacity – will not accomplish that.
Five years in, the Alberta government has never released data from the Model for independent evaluation. And, despite all the unsupported bluster about the Model reducing deaths, provincial drug poisoning rates kept rising through its life course, reaching an all-time high in 2025.
That trend continues with more emergency dispatches than ever in 2026. The province, having decimated its harm reduction infrastructure, has left drug war survivors and those who care for them at the mercy of the drug supply. The strategy now is to enter treatment or deal with the deadly drug supply alone.
The Alberta government wants us to believe it has built an evidence-based system of care to reduce substance use and treat addiction.
First leg: Spread through disinformation
In some ways, the Alberta Recovery Model has worked as a Trojan horse for forced abstinence. Like any horse, it has four legs – and a belly full of secrets.
First, the Alberta government touted short-term decreases in drug-related deaths as evidence of the Recovery Model’s success, and as grounds to eliminate other harm reduction programmes: the state terminated safe opioid supply prescribing in 2022 and closed drug consumption rooms in 2025 and 2026.
However, the drug deaths data simply wasn’t adding up. Public announcements of monthly fatalities didn’t match with more complete data (launched months after) – where the death count would, in some cases, was almost 40% higher than what was first shared.
Regardless of its real efficacy, the Alberta government worked hard to spread its Recovery Model. Uncovered internal documents showed concerted efforts by Albertan province officials to convince other provinces’ mental health ministers of their model’s success. Using outdated tropes of addiction and the lack of options beyond coerced treatment, it successfully exported its model to Saskatchewan and Ontario in 2024.
Second leg: Surveillance
In 2021, Alberta’s government launched Digital Overdose Response System (DORS), a privately run overdose response app that registered the phone numbers (and more data) of people using drugs to dispatch emergency services if they were using alone. Despite collecting data on over 3,000 people using drugs (data which can be handed to the state or sold online), it dispatched emergency services only 50 times in four years.
In 2022, the government began requiring that anyone accessing drug consumption rooms provide their personal health number – a decision criticised for raising barriers of surveillance to those accessing these services.
But the largest of all its surveillance tools deployed was My Recovery Plan, an app the government announced in 2021 to provide ‘transparency’ on the recovery system. This was owned by government ally and private BC-based recovery centre Last Door Recovery Society. It was launched on millions in sole-source contracts. The sensitive information of vulnerable people accessing services – many of whom appear to have been coerced or tricked into using the app – was visible to staff at Last Door.
By late 2025, My Recovery Plan had collected data on 7,480 people who use drugs. Then, without a public word, the government abandoned it – just as the Auditor General was reportedly investigating the app.
In total across these systems, the personal information of around 15,000 people who use drugs was collected, mostly in privately owned databases. This information remains there to this day.
Third leg: Physically coercive police power
In 2020, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police –– likely feeling pressure to reform during waves of protests against policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder –– publicly endorsed drug decriminalisation. In 2023, the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police reversed this position to be more aligned with the UCP government, which was seeking re-election that year. Police support the Alberta Recovery Model because it secures and expands drug criminalisation, linked to perhaps half of police funding.
Since then, Alberta has expanded policing, with officers given greater powers to criminalise and detain people who use drugs. Nowadays, police agencies across the province regularly conduct mass public harassment campaigns and evictions of people living in tents, sending them to privately connected “navigation centres”. There they are offered a range of services geared toward getting them off drugs –– everything, it seems, except housing and harm reduction. Since 2021, police have even been empowered to ‘connect’ people with medications for opioid withdrawal while detaining them.
As Minister of Public Safety Mike Ellis said in 2022, “the police are going to be at the pointy end of the stick” in the Alberta Recovery Model.
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Fourth leg: Erosion of autonomy
The UCP government has also weaponised existing legislation to target systems of care that exist outside the Alberta Recovery Model, whittling down people’s options until there is nowhere else to turn.
The Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act is a public snitch law through which citizens can trigger an investigation of any property where drug use is suspected. The government has used this law to target harm reduction-oriented nonprofit agencies.
The government has also used the SCAN Act to close countless drug houses (or ‘trap’ houses), accelerating mass-evictions.
Researcher Maryellen Gibson at the University of Saskatchewan is working to tell a different story about drug houses. She says they can be a place to “have a shower, do laundry, have a meal and a rest, connect with people who have shared experiences, find power and purpose in leadership or familial roles, or create protection for others.”
The existence of drug houses – and their targeting by the government – is a direct consequence of the government’s failure to provide housing, as well as its underfunding and destruction of overdose prevention services.
The Alberta government is learning to use even more insidious means to attack these services, publishing fraudulent ‘study’ in March 2026 rife with undeclared conflicts of interest and methodological shortcomings.
Inside the Trojan horse
Since 2024, the Alberta government has unveiled the nexus of its Model: mass-scale forced abstinence of people who use drugs through the Compassionate Intervention Act. The Act empowers essentially anyone to seek a court order placing any child or adult into what could amount to indefinite detainment for substance use, complete with forced medication.
The system was modeled after and vastly expands upon the Protection of Children Abusing Drugs Act, or PChAD, which has operated since 2006 to place roughly 500 Alberta children in forced withdrawal – with Indigenous children massively overrepresented. Despite children in PChAD being used as the policy foundation and mainstreaming strategy for the Compassionate Intervention Act, their survival post-programme has never been evaluated.
The Compassionate Intervention Act is the final step of monetising people’s system-induced vulnerability to secure billions in long-term, sustainable revenues for government-friendly businesses. It will send hundreds of people each year through government-appointed panels who will judge their need for what the government refers to as ‘treatment.’
Compassionate Intervention Act proponents say it’s a measure of last resort, but that’s a lie: Alberta has spent seven years refusing to expand proven, evidence-based systems and services, refusing to decriminalise drugs, and refusing to take measures to end homelessness.
Even worse, a buried decade-old report showed that abusive tactics are frequently used by police to seize those children. Demands for a legislative review were never seen through. Instead, the government copied and vastly expanded the most violent elements of this system for people of all ages.
The financial beneficiaries of this system are some of the same government-connected people who gathered in 2018 to develop a framework for an abstinence-based model of care. The biggest contracts in the system are going to them, with government-connected companies incorporating one day and receiving tens of millions in public money the next.
The Alberta government’s bait-and-switch on ‘addiction treatment’ has given rise to an abusive system built on alleged corruption that casts a surveillance and policing shadow on a large subset of the population – poor, Indigenous, racialised, and people who use drugs. As we watch this play out in other provinces, with its language even replicated in Trump’s announcements, understanding its roots in Alberta becomes more important than ever.
