Rhode Island's Supervised Drug-Use Site Has Been Open Nearly Two Years. Its Funding Runs to 2028.

The first thing most visitors want at Rhode Island's overdose prevention center is coffee. The second is the bathroom. Ashley Perry, who directs the site for the nonprofit Project Weber/RENEW, walks reporters past the check-in desk, the showers and the laundry before reaching the stairs that lead to the room where people use drugs under supervision of trained staff, a short walk from the Rhode Island Hospital campus.

Nearly two years into operation, that room is the most closely watched square footage in American drug policy. Rhode Island legalized supervised consumption in 2021, the first state to do so, and the Providence center opened in early 2025 as the country's first state-sanctioned and regulated site.

The numbers the operators report

Project Weber/RENEW told WJAR in late October that the center had logged 17,000 visits, more than 230 general interventions and 130 overdoses handled on site since opening — 130 people, in executive director Colleen Daley Ndoye's framing, who were not met by an ambulance or wheeled into an emergency department. Ten days later, Perry gave Ocean State Media and Connecticut Public a different pair of figures: more than 12,000 visits and 200 overdose interventions. The two briefings do not reconcile, and neither outlet defined "visit" or "intervention." The case for supervised consumption rests on counts that only the operators compile, because no state surveillance system records an overdose that a staff member reversed with oxygen and a recliner instead of naloxone and a stretcher. Rhode Island's health department tracks fatal overdoses, and those are down by half since 2022 — the steepest decline in the country, state officials have said. Attribution is another matter: naloxone saturation, expanded methadone and buprenorphine access, and a shifting illicit supply all moved at once.

The room, and the bill

Inside, the center functions as a low-threshold front door. Staff hand out clean supplies from a rolling cart, monitor the injection booths and the smoking room, and keep a "calm down room" for people in crisis; Perry describes most overdose responses as oxygen and observation in a cluster of recliners rather than a rescue. Showers, laundry, food, clothing and basic medical care are part of the offer. VICTA, a treatment provider, has staff on site and refers people who want more intensive care to its South Providence facility.

The money is the harder question. Kathy Schultz, director of the Governor's Overdose Task Force, told reporters the center has been sustained with opioid settlement funds and is financed "through FY28." State financial records put at least $5.5 million of settlement money into the center this year, and there is no confirmed plan for what happens after 2028, when that commitment ends. Private donors cover some of the rest.

For a state of about a million residents, $5.5 million a year is real money and small money at once — a fraction of what Rhode Island spends on treatment and emergency response, and a recurring line item in a budget scheduled to shrink. Critics have argued since the 2021 law that the site encourages drug use. Perry rejects the premise. "I don't think that this overdose prevention center brings drug use," she said. "I think it changes the way we talk about drug use."

The published evidence for opioid addiction treatment in this setting is what the next two budget cycles will test: whether a state will keep paying for a service whose main product is an overdose that never becomes a 911 call, and whether the operators can produce numbers consistent enough to defend when the settlement stream narrows.