Drug use must be a health issue
There has only been one story in Scottish politics in the past week and that was the shocking news that last year there were 1339 deaths due to drugs.
Each death is an individual tragedy impacting on families and friends. Every death is an unnecessary blight and an indication of failure.
Scotland has the worst death rate in Europe and there is no sugar coating what is a deeply profound failure in public policy making.
Even here in Perthshire we find we are not immune. Where drug related deaths are mainly associated with inner city deprivation, drugs deaths rose by a third in Perthshire and 34 people lost their lives to drugs in 2020.
The question is what do we do now to tackle this? The Scottish Government has responsibility for our health services and has pledged to invest £250 million into services such as rehabilitation and family services.
Angela Constance has been appointed as the dedicated drugs minister and already there is a whole new energy being deployed to get on top of this.
But where an increased resource and new services will certainly help address our issues, it will only do so much. Such is the scale of our problem that we will need every tool in the kit bag to deal with an issue that has become generationally ingrained.
The culture will have to change, and we will have to learn from international examples.
The Scottish Affairs Committee, which I chair, undertook the biggest ever inquiry into problem drug use in Scotland. We spoke to service providers, the health service, law officers, governments, and problem drug users themselves. We provided a way forward which looked at every facet of the problem.
Where we concluded that more resource was required, we also said that criminalising drug users and dealing with the problem as a criminal justice issue had failed.
We recommended that ‘drugs’should become a health issue where problem drug users are treated instead of criminalised. We said that the stigmatisation of drug users had to be tackled and we said that this should become a public health emergency.
Perhaps most significantly we recommended that Scotland should pilot a‘drugs consumption facility’where problem drug users could take their drugs safely and be introduced to services that could assist them in finding treatment.
Drug laws are reserved to Westminster and this proposal was rejected by the UK Government, but the Scottish Government has said that it will now establish these facilities irrespective of Westminster’s intransigence.
There is no good reason why Scotland has been so hard hit with this problem, though some have suggested that it could be a result of the alienation caused to communities with the de-industrialisation of the 80 and 90s and childhood traumas leading to a disposition in acquiring a problem.
But other nations have shown that with the right approach covering everything from health, to drugs laws, to the general culture, things can be improved. It is those examples we must emulate now.
From left, Margaret Ponton of Friends of Wallace Park, Nick Mainprize, TRACKS project officer, Iain Dewar from J M Dewar and Janet Watson, Friends of Wallace Park