A Rhode Island nonprofit will open a government-sanctioned illegal drug use site this week, making it only the second organization in the U.S. to offer officially monitored consumption and the first to do so outside New York City.
The nonprofit, Project Weber/RENEW, will hold a ribbon-cutting event for its new facility in Providence, RI, on December 10, and is expected to begin offering the controversial harm reduction service after receiving final permit approval shortly thereafter.
The opening represents a long-awaited expansion of supervised consumption, which aims to prevent deaths by allowing drug users to consume under medical supervision. Currently, only one organization, New York-based nonprofit OnPoint, officially offers the service, having offered supervised consumption at its two Manhattan locations since late 2021. While organizations in other states have announced plans to operate similar facilities, they have been met with resistance at the local and state levels, as well as from the federal government.
“I don’t think anyone wants to continue to watch people die, and this is the evidence-based intervention that can complement the work we’re doing on Narcan distribution and other forms of harm reduction,” said Lisa Peterson, chief of the department Operation. official of VICTA, an addiction treatment provider that partners with Weber/RENEW to offer clinical services at the harm reduction center.
“The consumption space is really just one part of a much broader approach to harm reduction,” she said, arguing that the location will deliver positive outcomes not only for its customers, but also for the entire neighborhood it serves. “But it has positive consequences for the neighborhood in terms of cleanliness, in terms of your child not walking to school and seeing someone on the sidewalk overdosing.”
Well before November’s presidential election, Weber/RENEW officials had announced their intention to open the supervised consumption site in late 2024. Still, the timing of the facility’s opening is notable: President-elect Donald Trump takes office in about seven weeks, and Conservative political leaders have generally opposed supervised consumption, arguing that the sites violate a federal law that is widely known as the “crackhouse statute,” which prohibits operating a facility for the purpose of the unlawful use of a controlled substance.
Although he is a prominent federal prosecutor threatened in 2023 to halt OnPoint’s work, the Biden administration has largely looked the other way since the New York City facilities opened in 2021 with the support of two Democratic mayors: Bill de Blasio and later Eric Adams.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, actively opposed the practice of controlled consumption and even sued in 2019 to block Safehouse, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, from opening a site there. And while a federal prosecutor in New York has threatened to ban OnPoint from further operations, he has so far allowed the organization to continue its work. As of mid-2024, OnPoint NYC said it had intervened to prevent more than 1,500 overdoses since opening.
“Americans struggling with addiction need treatment and less access to lethal drugs,” Rod Rosenstein, then deputy attorney general, wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 2018. “They don’t need a taxpayer-sponsored haven to skyrocket.”
However, the opening in Rhode Island is groundbreaking in the legal battle: the site is the first to begin operating under the umbrella of a specific state law that legalizes controlled consumption. Rhode Island passed a bill in 2021 that creates a supervised consumption pilot program. Minnesota’s legislature passed a similar bill in 2023, and Vermont’s in 2024. California’s legislature has also passed several bills allowing pilot-controlled consumption sites, but each was vetoed by Democrats. governor.
Aside from their likely illegality under federal law, opponents of supervised consumption sites argue that they allow people who use drugs to continue doing so without consequences, and can attract crime and unruly behavior to the neighborhoods where they are hosted.
Advocates say the locations provide drug users with a sanctuary, allowing them to consume substances with safer supplies and without fear of death. The sites also typically offer harm reduction services such as sterile needles or pipes, wound care and more basic quality of life products such as hot meals and washing machines.
The evidence regarding the overall effectiveness of supervised consumption sites is limited. But the sites are common in Europe and elsewhere in the world, including Canada, although several sites in other countries have also been affected local opposition. Most studies suggest that their presence is linked to a reduction in overdose deaths – and do not support opponents’ claims that they are linked to increased drug use or other crime. In 2023, the National Institute on Drug Abuse awarded researchers from New York University and Brown University to study outcomes related to the opening of supervised consumption sites in New York and Providence.
“These are very well-studied interventions in Canada, in Europe, and there are recent reports from France showing significant reductions in emergency department visits and overdoses among people using overdose prevention centers,” says Brandon Marshall, a Brown professor. will lead the project in Rhode Island. “That said, this is a unique context: we have by far the most serious overdose crisis in the world, a different health care system than any other developed country, so I think it behooves us to understand how overdose prevention centers can function effectively in a broader continuum of care here in the United States.”
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