Drug addiction isn’t a moral failing, it is society’s failing
ANNUAL drug deaths in Scotland are set to break through the 1000 mark for the first time – but barely a collective eyebrow has been raised.
Too often in Scotland, the response to the addicted is judgment and scorn, where compassion and empathy are needed.
Addicts are too easily dehumanised as we step around them like human litter, glued to our phone screens.
Just as drug addicts have become numbed to society, society has become numbed to them – and that is our shame, not theirs.
A reason lies behind every addiction, some perhaps more obvious than others.
In this country, the carnage inflicted on society through deindustrialisation and the erosion of community by city planners has created vacuums in the souls of thousands. Their lives have been impoverished and not simply financially.
Poverty of hope, poverty of ambition, poverty of expectation, poverty of emotion and empathy have laid waste to many lives, carving emptiness into souls pushers know only too well how to fill.
Not one addict in Scotland wants to be locked in addiction. It wasn’t a choice on careers day at high school.
Addiction isn’t a moral failing, it is society’s failing.
Scotland has the largest number of overdose deaths per capita in western Europe and more than double the number of England and Wales. Our country’s drug problem is a public health emergency, a critical illness we are treating with the urgency of a minor ailment.
In the coming weeks this newspaper is running a series of articles posing the question: What should we do about Scotland’s drug deaths? If there is a solution, it lies in a national conversation we have yet to have.
It’s a polarising topic but one which must be debated, with anger, with passion, with a dogged determination to thrash out a solution.
Around 146 people died on Scotland’s roads in the last year and rightly we do everything in our power to stop that number climbing. But 1000 drug deaths is a statistic which raises a fraction of the alarm.
I come from a small working class town where so many are devastated by drugs. Thatcherism took a wrecking ball to communities across Scotland and austerity is finishing the job.
Disempowered people become disinvested in life and drugs fill the void. The middle classes and the rich are not excluded from addiction but drug abuse disproportionately affects the poor.
Over the years, I have interviewed so many people whose lives have been destroyed by addiction.
One father admitted moments of wishing his daughter dead rather than watch drugs rob a little more of her each day.
But does an addict have to be family before we care?
Treating knife crime as a health issue led to a dramatic drop in stabbings in 2005.
Glasgow was branded the murder capital of Europe but 10 years later, admissions to hospital through stabbings had fallen by 65 per cent. The pioneering approach, including through the work of the Violence Reduction Unit, will now be used in England as a blueprint.
In supporting the move, Theresa May ignored the inconvenient truth of a correlation between poverty and violence.
It wasn’t just the work of the VRU which helped tackle Scotland’s knife crime but a co-ordinated effort in schools, communities, hospitals, prisons and workplaces.
Drugs are as murderous as knives but the deaths are less dramatic – though the loss is just as devastating.
The Scottish Government needs to start with a national public health inquiry if it is serious about reversing the trend.
The rest of us need to look beyond the symptoms of addiction, and consider the causes. No one ever got clean through judgment.