From Brian Lawson, former Leader of Renfrewshire Council
Police believe the number of suspected drug deaths in Scotland increased by 10% in 2023. According to figures published as part of Police Scotland’s quarterly report, there were 1197 suspected drug deaths between January and December 2023. This was 10% more than that the same period of 2022 which saw 1092 deaths.
Work is now underway to create the UK’s first sanctioned drugs consumption room at the Hunter Street Health Centre in the east end of Glasgow.
Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership will cover the costs of redesigning a building, creating a reception and injecting area with booths as well as treatment rooms and a recovery area. The Scottish government has agreed to provide a budget of £2.3million a year for three years.
It would seem unrealistic to think that any drug users from out with the East End of Glasgow will travel to this facility. As users will have to bring their own supply of drugs to inject, there will be no reduction in the profits of the local drug dealers. One could argue with the decrease in drug deaths forecast as a result of this facility, their clients will live longer and generate even greater profits for the dealers and the criminal wholesalers of these concoctions of unknown quality who care nothing for their end users / customers.
I feel uneasy about the whole proposal. It seems to give a nod of government approval to the illicit drugs ‘industry’. It sends out a subtle message that the consumption of contaminated opiates is now almost acceptable. It appears to be a small scale, headline grabbing, sticking plaster for what is a massive international problem.
A cynical person might easily suggest it is a way of avoiding the real but far more expensive solution to the problem which involves providing a much larger number of drug rehabilitation places designed to get users off drugs and not encourage them to continue to take more under Scottish Government supervision.
The SNP government have rightly been ridiculed for its consultation on limiting meal deals which initially included porridge oats. Planning to ban meal deals while in Glasgow you will be able to buy a wrap of heroin, go to a consumption room, and they will supervise you to inject it safely seems like hypocrisy of the highest level.
Perhaps we should have safe consumption rooms for meal deals and porridge – we could call them cafes.
BRIAN LAWSON
Paisley.
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hen the FM’s brother in law is a dealer why do you think he wants to set up those safe rooms. I totally agree with Mr Lawson on his disgust on this issue.
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“Perhaps we should have safe consumption rooms for meal deals and porridge – we could call them cafes.”
Sentence of the week, Brian!
I’m not against drug consumption rooms per se but they can only ever be one part of a multifaceted drugs policy. As per with nuSNP ideas these days, they look at how other countries are doing things, then select the easiest part of the system to introduce into Scotland without any of the other parts that actually make it work.
Take the baby box (yes please take it!), Finland does indeed have very good outcomes for children, but the box is the very least of it. However the rest of the policy interventions take time, effort and money so of course Nikla didn’t bother with that and waxed lyrically about the game changing effects of well, a box. But it was easy to introduce and got her good publicity which was all she cared about.
Similarly, Portugal has had very good outcomes in reducing harm and deaths from illegal drugs. Consumption rooms have been one small part of that. However since the rest of the policies are time consuming, and require money and education, well let’s not bother with that. Let’s focus on harm reduction rather than rehabilitation because if they can reduce deaths, even if lives are still ruined, then that get’s rid of some bad publicity for the Scottish government.
Seems I’m one of those cynics Brian was talking about! I prefer the term – realistic with my eyes open about the performative politics of the nuSNP and pseudoGreens.
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I am no expert in this field but I have had conversations with my daughter who works for a company providing support services to people with drug dependency.
Consumption rooms offer a safe, clean environment where naloxone, an antidote to overdose can be administered by a professional in an emergency.
In European countries, for example Switzerland and Germany, the facilities are staffed by medical professionals, social workers and people with lived experience of drug dependency.
A friend who worked in social services told of a young lass whose body was discovered behind a billboard; she had died there from an overdose, the needle still in her arm. Surely if lives can be saved it is worth trying?
There will be opportunities to offer alternatives to those using the facility, hopefully for many the first step on the road to recovery.
There is a stigma attached to those who fall victim to ‘hard’ drug use, remember that as you reach for a cigarette, a vape, a wee dram or a nice glass of Pinot Grigio. There but for fortune. .
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This is only one aspect of a burgeoning drug problem in Scotland. I was talking by phone on Saturday evening with my 91 year old mother who lives in small town traditionally fishing/farming NE Scotland. She receives prescription drugs from her local pharmacy delivered to the door by a guy who she has known since he went to school in my class on the same day back in 1968.
He has been telling her that the abuse of prescription drugs in the community has reached crisis point and he is regularly calling 999 to summon aid to the victims.
A major symptom of the malaise is the economic decline in this particular community and others across our country. The sense of hopelessness and despair in what was firmly wealthy, full-employment, middle-class Scotland in my younger years but which has been blighted by decades of political malevolence is utterly palpable. You can reach out your hand and touch the misery.
The media cranks up the “Scottish drug deaths” narrative at every opportunity without ever genuinely drilling down into the causes of the effect and that is shameful. Only another example of malevolence.
I am writing this response only 36 hours after being informed that a lifelong friend from the selfsame community had drunk himself to cardiac arrest and death through his own personal despair.
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Unfortunately, illegal drugs are the inevitable result of poverty, not the full reason by a long way but it is why a substantial number of Scots turn to illegal drugs, just as they did previously with alcohol and gambling and those are still major problems. Addiction to anything is extremely difficult to prevent or to remove from our society.
The deliberate impoverishment by England over centuries has created a junkie-state, and that’s just how they intend to keep Scotland.
Our political parties and our politicians have, despite several opportunities and many mandates, failed to deliver our people from this never-ending cycle of underfunding. At the same time they have watched as our resources have been plundered for the benefit of a few in a foreign nation.
Westminster is currently using the right of their English Crown to remove our resources and wealth to enrich a few in the south of England and the money goes to places around the world that most Scots will never see.
So, what has “the Scottish Government” done to protect us from this piracy? Answers on a postcard please and send to the people of Scotland because they would like to know what you have done for the super salaries and expense accounts that you currently use!
What are they doing to prevent the building of infrastructure to send our power south to benefit England? What are they doing to prevent the introduction of freeports? The answer is of course nothing, but it’s worse than that because our own government is collaborating to create these freeports are “a partner” with the UK government! As Kate Forbes when she was Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Economy stated in a letter to Michael Gove on 12 February 2022, “I very much welcome the resumption of joint working between the Scottish and UK Governments, on a partnership basis…….”
Cannot get much clearer than that! Our own so-called government is handing over large areas of Scotland to unaccountable corporations who will provide minimal and probably zero benefit for Scotland or its people and in only a few weeks or months that government will be asking the people to use their 1-day sovereignty to re-elect them for another 5 years. My memory is not what it was, but I don’t recall freeports, or any number of wacky-party style legislation being proposed in the last manifesto.
Another 5 years of selling Scotland to the lowest bidder will begin with the usual speech about “eradicating poverty in Scotland”. I wonder how many times I have heard that promise to the people?
As long as we do not have full control over all of our affairs at home and abroad, our ability to reverse centuries of Westminster’s programme of Scottish impoverishment they will continue to develop this junkie state.
It is no longer the dream that will never die, it’s the nightmare that will last forever, if we rely on politicians to continue dictating our lives.
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Spear. My view is very much that illegal drugs are the result of profit
Profit sits at the heart of all drug dealing and there is probably more money made from selling Charlie to middle class and the well to do than to folk at the bottom end.
Poverty iin my view is not the predominant cause. That said for a variety of reasons drug deaths are more concentrated in the poorer stratas of society.
Drug profit however is now very much a part of our society. Many many businesses, especially but not limited to cash businesses are founded on drug cash. And that cash without a shadow of a doubt influences not just our Local Government in their dealings with these businesses but also officers in Police Scotland.
Our country is in truth a sewer from top to bottom. So yes, the drug consumption room as proposed, is but virtue signalling, and will do nothing to curtail the illegal drug business
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Absolutely Spear. They don’t even try to hide it now. I never like emotive descriptions of people but I am now believing that our politicians are self serving traitors to Scotland.
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It is essential, I believe, to remember that drug-consumption of one-sort-or-another has always been a feature of human behaviour, at some point, throughout all cultures of the world. People, it seems, have always devised methods to escape the harsh realities of their existence, and that’s largely why alcohol-prohibition failed in the US, and why the impossibilist war-on -drugs is meeting a similar fate. Imagine, if you can, a life lived under the constant stress of impoverishment on every meaningful level of your life. You are already marginalised the moment you are born in too many parts of our country. Your understanding of your position may be vague or it may be completely apparent to you. No matter which, you’ll have the awful certainty of realising at whatever level, that strategies of escape are few-and-far-between. You’re stuck, mired, making life seem futile and futureless.
Who in such a position, if given the opportunity of escaping through the use of opiates, would not be tempted to exit their miserable, stressed-out existence, if only momentarily, and hang the consequences; for what addict doesn’t quickly grasp that they’ve signed-up for a slow or perhaps not so slow form of sucide? Much of the addict’s actual addiction is psychological in nature thus little understood by many objective commentators. First of all, we’re not talking about intrinsically bad people here (I’ll leave that sobriquet to the politicians, the bankers and the drug suppliers etc.) We are talking, in many cases, about people born with very few options worth the name, who have, arguably, made the decision to cancel their misery with man-kinds oldest palliative measure: the use of drugs.
Accept or reject any or all of the above, the fact remains, if a society has created a scenario wherein certain members find a momentary form of sanity through the use of opiates then that same society is surely obliged to, at least, make sure that its victims, and that’s what they are, are deserving of safe facilitation, including, of course, the testing of the frequently adulterated goods which they firmly intend to consume, somewhere! That would appear to me to be a much weightier moral imperative than any discussion than anything arising from any discussion of the moral rights or wrongs of drug-consumption or anything else, regarding users and their access to safe, legally sanctioned, spaces. We are dealing with a highly pernicious public-health-issue here above anything else in my opinion, one which needs to be radically addressed and made transparent to all, including, of course, the politicians, who thus far appear to know little or nothing about the whys-and-wherefores of addiction, while appearing to care even less about the unnecessary fatalities . The continued holding of unconscious, class considerations and other irrational prejudices in relation to addicts and addiction will, I believe, only see us describing that same endless and thoroughly pointless circle of frequently learned ignorance that exists around the question addiction, ad infinitum.
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As Erichvonbarrhead and others have mentioned, drugs and other addictions are complex issues and there is no single answer to any of them. The reasons why people turn to the various “escapes” are too numerous to mention.
In my early years and for my own reasons I lived on the streets of London for almost 18 months and I definitely learned more during that time than in any other period of my life. My point being that of the many thousands there with me, the different reasons why we ended up where we did were so numerous that it would be impossible to collate them all.
However, during that time I received more help and kindness from others around me than any formal help – from people who had nothing to give but their kindness. Likewise, I saw so many that developed addictions. Of course, there were some there because of their addictions as they too had succumbed to the draw of illicit drugs, gambling, alcohol or other “escapes” for just as many different reasons. I have always thought that “using drugs as an escape” is an oxymoron because that “escape” just draws people deeper into the mire that dealers have created especially for them. I have always considered myself fortunate to have avoided that mire – probably more by good fortune than by fortitude.
There have been some great points made by others here but as we are aware, there is no perfect or simple answer, however the eradication of poverty would be a great start. At least it would help provide people with hope that they have a future and I’m sure that this will only be seen once we remove the shackles of London rule that is designed to keep us exactly where we are.
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Drug Policy is RESEREVED! Most come into UK via South east ports! Why people get addicted . needs to be addressed. We knw most of it is poverty driven, NO HOPE, Some of it is prescription frug addiction driven! Scotland records death by drugs differently. Crash your car and die under influence of prescription drugs…it gets recorded as drug related death! These room give the sinposting to get off the drugs etc. When you only get pocket money and not enough financing you need, it is difficult to do everything we need done…no matter who is in Gov here!
Users bring their own supply whish gets tested. Dodgy Dealers and pushers will not like this. Feck em! The word will get oout and they lose custom hopefully!
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I personally don’t think the SNP government cares about the fate of drug users, and they have had a kneejerk reaction to the public outcry to do something about the deaths of Scots via drug misuse which is the highest in Europe. I really get the feeling that the SNP government doesn’t care about Scots, and even less for those with an addiction.
Glasgow City Council better better known as Tammany Hall is to close the women’s aid (women with drug addiction) Turning point 218 in Glasgow, even though our esteemed FM said that it did fantastic work and that he was fully supportive of it.
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I think you are right when you say that the Scottish Government doesn’t care about drug addiction.
Drugs sare big business. Big big business and especially so at the illegal supply end with dome estimates putting annual illegal drug sales at around £2 billion a year.
So think about that in numbers. It’s a huge amount of cash and it’s therefore no surprise that the money finds its way into taxi companies, bus companies, garages, pubs, restaurants, barber shops, saunas, sun bed shops, developers, and all other manner of enterprises.
And no surprise either that funds and or benefits get paid to local government officials to grease applications, secure operating licences, help to make things difficult for legit operators. And all under the watchful eye of Plod who catches the minions but not the big boys.
Even Humza Yousaf’s brother is suspected of drug dealing and exits out of third story apartment windows.
Very much gives an insight into the narco economy that today’s Scotland is.
So wwho really cares about drug deaths. Box em up, dig em down, it’s about as hard hearted as that and the expensive car dealers would not have it any other way.
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