Opinion | Safe drug sites work. Our data proves it.

A Narcan vending machine in Evansville, Indiana. (Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post) Charles Fain Lehman and Kevin A. Sabet's April 21 op-ed, "'Safe drug sites' don't work. The data proves it.," asserted that a "large body of research" has found no effect of these sites on overdose risk. As public health researchers whose studies evaluating supervised consumption facilities were reviewed in the op-ed, we disagree. For example, unmentioned is one study that tracked nearly 1,000 of Vancouver's highest-risk drug users for more than 10 years and found that frequent users of the city's main supervised consumption facility had an approximately 50 percent lower risk of death after accounting for differences in age, gender and drug use patterns. Also unmentioned is the study estimating the combined impact of these facilities, free access to medications to reverse overdoses, and opioid dependence treatment, which found that more than 3,000 overdose deaths were averted in the first year of our current overdose crisis. The authors also did not acknowledge data from Toronto showing that, over a two-year period, neighborhoods with supervised consumption facilities experienced a lower rate of overdose deaths over time.