TRAGIC TOLL OF SNP DRUG POLICY
DRUG-RELATED deaths in Scotland have soared to a record high in a ‘damning indictment’ of the SNP’s softtouch strategy on addiction.
official figures showed the number of deaths involving heroin, cocaine and ecstasy-type substances has never been higher, up 23 per cent in the past year.
The statistics revealed deaths involving ‘legal highs’ had more than tripled in a year – and now average almost one a day.
overall drug-related fatalities in Scotland are now proportionately the highest in europe – and more than two-and-a-half times the rate of the Uk as a whole.
The figures come as health and council bosses plan a ‘shooting gallery’ in Glasgow where addicts will get medical-grade heroin from the NHS, despite fears it would break UN conventions.
The SNP recently announced an overhaul of its drugs policy ahead of today’s statistics – but released only limited details.
last night, leading drugs expert Professor Neil mckeganey said Scotland was not tough enough on drug dealers. He added: ‘What we have instead is ministerial handwringing, accompanied by the reassuring comments that we are spending more money on tackling
SCOTLAND is facing a national health disaster evident in the latest drug death figures – 8 7 deaths in 201 – 23 per cent higher than in the preceding year. Even for those who are well-used to presenting the dismal news of Scotland’s rising drug deaths to the Scottish public, those figures are deeply shocking.
We have pursued a policy of harm reduction for at least the last two decades.
That policy is based on the myth that you can reduce the harm of drug abuse without actually reducing the overall number of people using illegal drugs.
If ever there was an ironic testament to the failure of that policy it must surely be the fact that 41 per cent of the drug deaths now occurring in Scotland are linked to methadone.
The proportion of addict deaths linked to methadone is even higher in Glasgow where the drug is running virtually neckand-neck with heroin in the number of deaths it is causing.
Leaders of Glasgow’s addiction services recently announced that they had stopped prescribing one of the drugs most closely associated with addict recovery (Suboxone) and opted instead to provide a cheaper alternative which in the past has been associated with many deaths in Glasgow.
Some have said that the money saved from that policy is being used to fund Glasgow’s proposed ‘safe injecting’ centre for heroin addicts.
If that is the case, then those leading the development of this initiative need to be challenged at every turn.
WHAT we need are not more services seeking to enable individuals to inject their drugs more safely, but services that are focused on actively encouraging addicts to move away from injecting at all.
However, it is not just heroin or methadone that is causing such devastation across Scotland.
There has been a staggering 200 per cent increase in the number of deaths in Scotland linked to the former ‘legal highs’ – rising from 114 in 2015 to 34 in 201 . These figures are almost beyond belief.
Things have got so bad here that even the Scottish Drugs Forum, so often the first to heap praise on the Scottish Government for its drugs policy, has called for a fundamental review.
The failures here go well beyond our health services.
Some years ago, I undertook research which showed that drug enforcement agencies in Scotland were seizing little more than 1 per cent of the total amount of heroin consumed in any given year.
So where are our large drug seizures now? Where are the operations targeting the hundreds of millions of pounds flowing from Scotland’s lucrative drugs trade? Where are the enforcement operations tackling the trafficking in methadone which is generating so many of these deaths?
Where are the programmes actively discouraging addicts from injecting – and when did you last see a national drugs prevention campaign on the Scottish media? The answer to all of these questions is nowhere. What we have instead is ministerial hand-wringing, accompanied by the reassuring comments that we are spending more money on tackling our drugs problem now than at any time in the past, as if spending money were somehow a barometer of effective action when in reality it is a further indication of our comprehensive failure to tackle Scotland’s drugs problem.
IN a year’s time, we will in all probability be being told about another increase in Scotland’s drugs death statistics; and informed that it is the older addicts who are dying in such numbers, as if somehow those deaths can be laid at the door of past failures.
This problem, though, is now so serious that no Scottish ministers, no shadow ministers, indeed no Scottish politician worthy of the title, should not be actively engaged in addressing the multiple dimensions of Scotland’s drugs problem. We need a step change in enforcement. Scotland needs to become a hostile environment for those selling drugs.