Addiction counsellor emphasizes recovery after closure of Saskatoon’s supervised consumption site

After the closure of Prairie Harm Reduction last week, an addictions counsellor is emphasizing the importance of putting people on a path to recovery.

Saskatoon’s only supervised drug consumption site, located on 20th Street West, shut down for good last week after its board was made aware of a “significant financial shortfall in operating funds.” The non-profit organization’s executive director, Kayla DeMong, was fired after the shortfall was brought to the board last month, and the site was shuttered on Thursday.

Read more:

• Prairie Harm Reduction to close after executive director firing, loss of provincial contracts
• ‘Significant change’ for community after Prairie Harm closure: Saskatoon mayor
• Supervised drug consumption site in Saskatoon closes its doors for good

Rand Teed – an addictions counsellor, certified prevention specialist and author – joined The Evan Bray Show on Monday to share his thoughts on the effects of sites like Prairie Harm Reduction, and whether the harm-reduction model is the best fit for communities and for those experiencing drug addictions.

Listen to the full interview with Teed, or read the transcript below:

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

EVAN BRAY: When you heard about this closure of Prairie Harm Reduction in Saskatoon, what was your initial reaction?

RAND TEED: My initial reaction was “That’s too bad.” But when we look at harm-reduction programs, I always evaluate them on whether they are actually helping people move to a higher level of health. And certainly they help with some of the medical issues – they’ll do some infection treatment and stuff like that – but I’ve often gotten the sense that they were really invested in helping people stay at the level of addiction that they walked in with, and unless we’re trying to improve things and reduce the level of substance dependence, then I’m not sure that that’s harm reduction. I don’t think keeping people where they were at should be the endgame. And I know in Alberta there’s been a significant increase in recovery options and a push for recovery there, and the death rate and overdose deaths have been reduced by 36 per cent, and so that’s the direction that we have to move. I was never totally convinced that Prairie Harm Reduction was really invested in that.

You and I have talked about this recovery-oriented system of care before, which is, I believe, the way the province of Saskatchewan is going, modelled somewhat after what Alberta has done. Do we have the building blocks in place to facilitate that higher level of health that you’re talking about? Or is it a case where harm-reduction agencies are doing their thing, but there’s no one there to help get them to that next step?

TEED: There’s been a progressive increase in recovery opportunities. There’s 40 more withdrawal-management spaces, there’s lots of new inpatient spots, and there’s more coming. And it’s always a work in progress. I know the ministry is very invested in trying to improve the situation and I’m a firm believer that if you help people stay in extreme, active addiction, you’re not helping them. You’re not making things better. I’ve seen lots and lots of people who were in desperate, desperate states get better once they moved away from from substance use, but there seems to have been an acceptance that they can’t get better, and I don’t believe that’s true. If you look at a broader picture, alcohol is still a leading cause of preventable deaths in Canada. There’s been 17,000 deaths in Canada in 2025 related to to alcohol use, and it’s legal. There’s supervised consumption sites and bars and a safe supply of alcohol. Alcohol is essentially poisonous on its own. We don’t talk about alcohol poisonings, but it’s still a huge issue. And the underlying issue under the whole thing is a very high level of substance-use problems. If you look at at the stats, there’s probably 24,000-25,000 people in Saskatoon, and close to the same Regina, who have a problematic level of substance use, and we’re not really looking at educating people better about what that looks like, and there’s still a lot of stigma involved in having a substance problem and getting effective substance-problem treatment. Those are the things that we really need to start to take a look at, and I never really felt that that harm-reduction sites were helping with that.

Over the years that you and I have been together at conferences or events, we’ve talked about how the person offering the help can’t want it more than the person who needs the help. There can be influence, there can be relationship building that helps the person who needs the help to get there, but that sometimes takes time and sometimes it just doesn’t happen. So is that where mandatory treatment – which is where our province is going – can step in and make a difference?

TEED: Well, certainly that can. It’s for a really small percentage of the population. I think people had some concern that there were going to be vans driving around gathering up people off the street, and that’s certainly not the case. The mandatory treatment is a tool that can be used for people that are absolutely incapable of making a decision to try and make things better for themselves, and we’ve done that with the Mental Health Act for years, so it isn’t an evil thing.

Just last week, I had a leader for one of the districts in Saskatoon, the Riversdale area, talking about the problems that these social challenges bring to the area. Businesses are closing down, customers are being turned away. Is it possible for these kind of entities to live within a neighborhood, live within a community, and everyone coexist? Or have we got that formula wrong?

TEED: The issue is that you need to take the services to where the people are. If you move the services out of the city, the people who really need them can’t get to them. But if the service isn’t making things better, if it tends to be exacerbating the problem or creating a larger collection of problem, then I think you need to question, is this service doing what it needs to do?

I wonder about the data, and I’m not sure if you’ve got any off the top of your head or that you’ve seen recently when it comes to the role that supervised consumption sites, or these sort of of centers, provide in terms of life-saving data, or even just the data that show that they are moving on to a healthier life. Is there some way that that is being analyzed, and are we factoring that into the cost-benefit analysis of of running a center like Prairie Harm Reduction?

TEED: It is. we’ve tried to track it, and it’s difficult because there’s all sorts of logistical issues in trying to track that stuff. But really, if the harm-reduction site isn’t actively promoting itself as a path to get better, then I’m not sure that they’re really doing the job that they need to do. If it is a place to just continue doing what you’re doing without any obvious options for change, I’m not sure that it’s it’s all that valuable.

In a perfect world, what does a system look like that works? Is Saskatchewan moving in the direction that you describe?

TEED: I think we’re moving in that direction. We had a recovery conference in Regina a couple of months ago, and had 700 people show up. We had anticipated we might get 300, so there’s huge interest. And the interesting thing about it is, everybody stayed to the end. Usually, at those conferences, people disappear after lunch, but they were so interested in that discussion about actually creating a system that helps people move through recovery that they stayed and listened. The ideal system would be like the ideal system we have if you have a heart attack – you get instant help. Right now there’s still wait lists and there’s wait times, and because substance use is highly emotional, people who have a significant level of addiction have a really hard time being without their drug of choice. And so we’ve got really good withdrawal-management protocols for all drugs, if people can get into places and get some help. And it’s not the kicking and screaming going through withdrawal like you used to see on TV. It’s medically-managed withdrawal, so that there isn’t a lot of suffering, but there is still a lag between when somebody realizes, “Hey, this isn’t working for me. I need to go and get some help,” to when they can actually ask access that help. There is pretty quick help for opiate issues in terms of the rapid-access addiction medicine clinics where people can get on Suboxone or methadone, those drugs that really help eliminate the opiate withdrawal, but still, that’s not looking at the emotional and the social piece of it, which recovery programs do. They help people rebuild their capacity to manage their emotional lives.