DRUGS MUGS
Westminster Tories reject EVERY plan to help solve Scotland’s drug death crisis
HEARTLESS Tories have rejected every major recommendation to tackle Scotland’s drug deaths crisis.
The shock snub came 10 months after a report by Westminster’s Scottish Affairs Committee called for a more liberal approach.
Committee chair Pete Wishart said: “We are surprised and disappointed.”
WITH the spotlight on the pandemic, another public health crisis has continued in its shadow. Problem drug use in Scotland took 1187 lives in 2018.
All evidence points to yet another increase in 2019. This emergency demands attention.
The previous Scottish Affairs Committee that I chaired reported in November that innovative, evidencebased solutions are required to halt Scotland’s spiralling drug crisis. We recommended measures with a proven track record of tackling drug dependency elsewhere, chief among which was to declare a public health emergency. Today, we have the UK Government’s response to that report. It is hugely disappointing.
It seems the Government is wedded to the criminal justice approach that has failed for years. Evidence of its failure is the death toll in Scotland rising by more than 10 per cent every year for the last five years on record. That’s a doubling of lives lost between 2014 and 2018.
Reports of a 52 per cent increase in use of Naloxone kits, which save lives by reversing the effects of an opiate overdose, suggests the death toll in 2019 would be even higher had it not been for these lastminute interventions. Naloxone doesn’t address the underlying cause. Two things are clear – this is an emergency and current policy is failing. A public health approach would avoid the damaging stigmatisation of a criminal justice response.
Decriminalisation of small amounts of substances for personal use, a campaign the Record has done exemplary work on, would allow more people to access treatment. It would also free up police resources that could be concentrated into targeting criminal gangs, stemming supply.
Still, we’re told that the current approach is “evidence-based” and that the UK Government’s Drugs Summit was a sounding board for this evidence. However, six months on, the Government hasn’t made any concrete changes to its approach since this summit, which brought together many of the stakeholders who gave evidence to our inquiry. No shift in policy, no summary of outcomes, no detail of the proposed intergovernmental ministerial meetings on drugs. It’s hard to see what impact the evidence is having on drugs strategy.
As for drugs consumption facilities, we travelled to various international destinations to examine how they operate and assess the difference they make. Everywhere we went, we saw for ourselves the contribution they made in keeping people who use drugs safe. We asked the Government just to try it out. To pilot a facility in Glasgow just to see if it could make any sort of difference to our drugs deaths crisis. Again, they felt obliged to reject this approach and pointed out various reasons why this could not happen.
Yet, should the Government do the right thing – the difficult thing – and bring forward the laws needed to open these facilities, it could start to bring down Scotland’s ever-growing rate of drug deaths.
Our drugs death numbers are the worst in Europe and we need the big levers of policy change to reverse this. Our report suggested a way forward based on evidence and experience. Its rejection means we will go on tackling this crisis with one hand tied around our back.