Residents living on Chicago’s West Side are advocating for a pilot overdose prevention center, where people can go to access wraparound resources that have successfully reduced overdose deaths in other states and use drugs under supervision of trained professionals who can intervene to prevent fatalities.
State Rep. La Shawn Ford — who’s the Democratic candidate to succeed Cong. Danny Davis come November’s election — is sponsoring House Bill 2929, which would authorize a state-sanctioned overdose prevention center in Illinois. He held a May 11 press conference at Rush University Medical Center on the Near West Side with local public health organizations and Brown University researchers to discuss the effectiveness of such centers.
“Most people would say, ‘There’s no way I would support people going on the street, buying drugs, coming in and using.’ But when you go to [a] site, it’s a place that is respectable. People are there talking to people that they trust, and people talk about the transition that they made from using street drugs to using medication to live a normal life,” Ford said during the press conference. “We often say that, if we could find a cure for something, we would do it. But here’s a cure right here to help our communities.”
In 2023, nearly 1,600 people died from an opioid overdoses in Cook County. According to the Chicago Health Atlas, 110 of those overdoses occurred in Austin, the highest number of any Chicago neighborhood.
“We need to make a difference in stopping that,” said Dr. Tanya Sorrell at the press conference. She’s an associate professor of psychiatry at Rush and chair of the Illinois Harm Reduction and Recovery Coalition. She said an overdose prevention center would decrease loss of life, allowing people “to gain those needed social services, health care services and emotional support services that, sadly, are not there, and that are lacking in our systems.”
Dr. Deondre Rutues is an Austin resident who leads weekly Courageous Conversations with the West Side Heroin/Opioid Task Force, where men who are using drugs or in recovery can talk to each other. He said that, out of five Courageous Conversation cohorts of 150 men, about 30 have graduated. Those men say they need ongoing community-based discussion spaces, more education on the current drug supply presence and trends, transparency around overdose hotspots, regulated dispensing models, and more visibility and access to harm reduction resources.
“That is everything that an overdose prevention site is,” Rutues said.
Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez of the 33rd Ward also attended the press conference. She’s heading a resolution in City Council in support of opening an overdose prevention center in Chicago. So far, she’s helped get 33 aldermen to approve of House Bill 2929.
“House Bill 2929 simply allows for Illinois to set up the framework and give it to the department to lay out the framework for what overdose prevention site would be,” Ford said. “But we would need the city to answer the call. We’ve passed many bills that sometimes municipalities are not interested in. So to be able to say, ‘Not only do we have the City of Chicago in support, they’re on record supporting this, so we need to pass it because they’re asking for it.’”
“We must dispel the myth of inevitable death. Nearly all opioid overdoses are reversible when a trained professional is present with oxygen and naloxone,” Rodriguez-Sanchez said. “While we have recently seen a 40% decline in fatal overdoses citywide, the crisis remains a public health emergency. The West Side continues to bear the heaviest burden, particularly among our Black and Brown residents, who die at twice the rate of others. We cannot just celebrate lower numbers when hundreds of our neighbors are still dying preventable deaths every year. A drop in numbers is a trend. A site on the West Side is a solution.”
An overdose prevention center is a solution that “would bring people closer to us so that we can provide the care that they want and need, until they are able to love themselves and stand on their feet with dignity and respect,” said Fanya Buford-Berry, director of the West Side Heroin/Opioid Task Force, at the press conference.
“This is about moving away from the so-called War on Drugs and toward a culture of care and a public health approach grounded in science, care, connection, harm reduction and recovery,” Ford said.
While Ford has previously introduced legislation to create an overdose prevention site in Chicago, he’s confident it will move forward this year, as House Bill 2929 has more support across the aisle than it previously had.
“Republicans joined on and said that they support this bill, that this is a pro-life bill. We now have made this a bipartisan bill,” Ford said. He added that, with three or four more Republican votes, the bill could pass the House.
The construction of a potential overdose prevention center in Illinois would be funded by $18 million from the Illinois Opioid Remediation Advisory Board, which manages part of state settlement funds from litigation against opioid manufacturers.
Overdose prevention center successes
Though people can go to an overdose prevention site to use substances they have already obtained, they can also often drop-in without appointment for clinical and health services, case management, Naloxone access and syringe exchanges, showers, washers and dryers, plus referrals or on-site access to substance-use treatment.
“These programs can really provide a wealth of services and support once you get folks in through the door,” said Alexandria Macmadu, a PhD assistant professor in Brown University’s department of epidemiology. She joined the press conference to share the college’s research on overdose prevention centers.
Over 200 overdose prevention centers around the world, some up to 30 years old, show data of their successes.
North America’s first medically supervised overdose prevention center opened in Vancouver, Canada in 2003. Two years after opening, the neighborhood around the center saw 35% less fatal overdoses.
Macmadu shared a 2024 study out of Toronto, Canada that showed that, one year after opening, overdose prevention centers in the city saw a 69% reduction in overdose deaths in a two-thirds-mile radius.
In 2021, OnPoint NYC opened the first two overdose prevention centers in the United States. As of April 2025, there were over 170,000 site visits to those centers and over 1,700 reversed overdoses.
Macmadu shared data that shows how overdose prevention centers that have trained supervisors to monitor drug use and intervene when necessary have significantly higher rates of preventing overdose deaths. She also said that neighborhood economic activity and foot traffic around overdose prevention centers is unaffected by their presence, and that these centers reduce 911 calls and arrests involving drugs, allowing first responders to prioritize other emergencies.
Another study out of Vancouver showed that 42% of 600 clients enrolled in some kind of treatment after using overdose prevention centers.
“That’s really a testament to the wraparound services, the relationships and the rapport that you build when people are returning to your program day after day,” Macmadu said.