Madness of making this busy station a magnet for drug addicts
ALMOST from the day it opened in 1897 it was the busiest and most impressive railway station in the country. While others such as Edinburgh Waverley and Glasgow Queen Street came to be dominated by their surroundings, this Victorian treasure remains truly insuperable.
At the front entrance, there are the ironwork flourishes of the ornamental canopy – overlooked by the dramatic clock tower of the Grand Central hotel. At the rear, the heavy engineering triumph of the Hielanman’s Umbrella and the familiar rumble of slow-moving rolling stock on the bridge overhead.
Not that many stop to gaze for long at the splendour of Glasgow’s Central Station. For years its environs have been a gathering place for drug addicts, drunks and menacing beggars. It is smack in the middle of Scotland’s worst crime hotspot.
If the pace of members of the public on the four streets surrounding the station is brisk, it is with good reason.
Inside, Glasgow Central ticks all the boxes for a big city transport hub in some style. There is a charming champagne bar offering views over the concourse; there are cafes and fashion outlets, a bustling M&S and a splendid four-sided clock suspended from a ceiling beam providing a natural meeting point.
One further box the station has ticked for the past year is that of needle exchange centre for drug addicts – even if such a service falls outwith most people’s understanding of what a railway station is for. Indeed, no other station in Scotland has ever offered such a service and only one in England does so.
But a week ago, station owner Network Rail announced it was discontinuing the exchange programme, explaining that it had to have regard for the welfare of the 100,000 visitors who passed through its doors every day.
In the 14 months the service had been available at the station’s Boots, Network Rail said, Glasgow Central had become a place where addicts collected their needles, took their drugs and left the evidence of it all around. And that was never the deal.
A spokesman said: ‘We have had regular issues with kits in bins and bathroom cubicles, used needles in toilet facilities, baby changing facilities and other station areas.’
Users under the influence of drugs have been found on the station premises or locked in the toilets in various states of consciousness.
The spokesman added: ‘We’ve also had issues with overdoses, including one fatal overdose.’
IN future, suggested the quango not entirely unreasonably, perhaps drug users wanting clean equipment could visit one of the other 50 or so needle exchange centres in Glasgow – some of them barely more than five minutes’ walk from the railway station.
Cue a tidal wave of furious condemnation. Public Health Minister Aileen Campbell declared the move ‘contrary to the ambitions’ of the Government’s drugs strategy and said it could exacerbate problem drug use in the area.
Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership said the closure flew in the face of evidence on the public health benefits of such centres – while Scottish Drugs Forum chief executive David Liddell said the decision ‘seems incredible’ at a time when there was an active outbreak of HIV.
He went on: ‘I don’t know how Network Rail think it is in the public interest to do this. It also begs the question about what their accountability is as a publicly funded agency.’
One national newspaper commentator even ventured the opinion Network Rail was ‘drastically veering from its remit’ by meddling with public health policy. Quite why providing clean needles for drug addicts should form part of a railway station’s remit in the first place was not revealed.
As politicians and public health officials lined up to lambast the supposed wrongheadedness of the rail operator’s decision, other public bodies with an interest in promoting tourism and preserving the amenity of Scotland’s busiest station scurried for cover.
VisitScotland, the Scottish Government-funded national tourism agency, said it preferred not to comment on whether one of the country’s key transport hubs – and a tourist attraction in its own right – should run a needle exchange centre under visitors’ noses. The Scottish Tourism Alliance, which styles itself as the ‘voice of the industry’, said the question was not one for it either.
What, then, is the impartial observer to conclude? That in withdrawing what had become Glasgow’s most widely used needle exchange centre the body responsible for running the nation’s rail infrastructure is beyond the pale? Certainly, there were good arguments for keeping the programme at the station’s Boots – not least of which the fact that most people were blissfully unaware it was operating in the first place.
If it were so disruptive, why was Network Rail not bombarded with complaints from station users asking why a railway station was enabling drug addicts?
The quango is unable to point to any customers who have asked it to shut down the centre.
Then there is the fact that needle exchange centres are proven to work. By providing clean needles to addicts who are going to take drugs whether they have sterilised equipment or not, they are preventing the spread of HIV and hepatitis C.
In short, they are helping to stop a dismal situation from getting worse. On top of that, there are the sheer numbers who have used the Central Station service in only 14 months. In total, 1,940 addicts have conducted 9,583 transactions, receiving 41,238 sets of clean injecting equipment and 20,520 sheets of foil – used for inhaling heroin, which is considered safer than injecting.
Without Network Rail’s ‘crucial’ exchange centre, would some of those drug users now be infected with HIV or dead?
Furthermore, says the multiagency Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership, ‘the service has been run in an exemplary fashion and is ideally placed to provide the service out of hours’.
The crux of the issue, perhaps, is whether this statement is true.
British Transport Police crime figures certainly lend credence to the suggestion that drug addicts
are well behaved around Central Station. Between January 2015 and December 2016, only 17 drugrelated crimes were recorded on the premises and 15 people were arrested. That is less than nine crimes a year.
Anyone using the station regularly, however, is confronted with a very different picture – as the Scottish Daily Mail revealed in an investigation into the area last year.
Under the Victorian canopy on Gordon Street, drug users, drunks and down and outs compete for begging pitches – the most highly prized of which is directly outside Virgin Rail’s first-class lounge.
Others play the intimidation game, hanging around ATMs just outside the station, waiting for new arrivals to use them. That is their cue to crowd them, palms open in expectation of payment. Some were seen to slip them coins just to get rid of them.
The first glimpse new arrivals catch of Glasgow, then, is the image of oppressive squalor the city has tried to shed for years. While the needle exchange was operating, many addicts went straight from Boots to the station toilets – in clear defiance of the terms on which Network Rail agreed to offer the service.
Those who did heed the station owner’s demand to steer clear of the station toilets were to be found only yards away. They gathered in lanes, at bin stores and in back alley doorways to do their shooting up, then discarded their equipment for passers-by, refuse collectors and security staff to find.
After taking their drugs, it was back to the main streets around the station for more begging – prevailing on the kindness of wellintentioned members of the public who trust that the money they are handing them is for buying food.
In fact, as close observation reveals, much of this money propels an unending cycle of begging and drug abuse which is entirely dependent on the heavy footfall around the station.
Having begged sufficient funds to buy a ‘tenner bag’, they then signal to one of the dealers hanging around the station that they are ready to do business. The deal is done in the same back alleys where they left their needles.
Thus, the station is the hub around which this bleak cycle operates – facilitating and feeding it day in, day out.
And yet, the station’s needle exchange centre continues to be described as ‘crucial’ by those bodies charged with easing the city’s addiction crisis.
Certainly, as a transport hub, it has the benefit of being central and easy to get to. But numerous other needle exchanges are central, too.
A ten-minute walk from the station, for example, in West Street, is the Glasgow Drug Crisis Centre, a dedicated facility for drug users which never closes. Day or night, it advises addicts and used injecting equipment can be brought in and disposed of safely and exchanged for new equipment.
It also offers a naxolone programme, educating people on what to do in the event of an overdose, an abscess and ulcer clinic, and advice for the growing number of steroid users in the city.
What it lacks, of course, is footfall. The area is not a tourist hotspot. The spectacle of drug users arriving at this one-stop centre to get help for their problem is one seen largely by locals. There is little scope for profitable begging.
Elsewhere in the city centre, chemists on Sauchiehall Street, St Vincent Street and the Trongate offer needle exchanges. They are also dotted around every area of the city.
Yet it is the closure of the facility in the station – a place with a very different role in society from chemist shops and drug help centres – which has provoked outrage.
SOME, such as Scottish Tory MSP Annie Wells, have no trouble in grasping the point that railway stations and needle exchange centres are not an ideal mix.
She said: ‘Anyone can see one of Scotland’s busiest train stations isn’t the right place for such a major needle exchange. Network Rail were right to be concerned about the safety of passengers passing through the station.’
She added: ‘However, these programmes do need to exist, and it’s important everyone works together to find a new base for this.’
Dr Iain McPhee, a leading expert in alcohol and drug studies based at the University of the West of Scotland, also argues the service should never have been available at the station in the first place.
He says the very fact the exchange is in an area under constant surveillance by security cameras encourages drug users to dispose of their equipment incorrectly.
Yet Network Rail admits it is aware of no other public body which has dared to raise its head above the parapet and ask whether or not such a facility really was appropriate in a railway station.
No such exchange exists in stations in Edinburgh or Aberdeen or, for that matter, King’s Cross or Euston or Waterloo in London.
In fact, the only other Network Rail station in the whole of the UK which offers a needle exchange is in Reading.
And while there may be no direct complaints about the service which had been running in Boots from July 2016 to last weekend, there is no shortage of concern about the constant presence of addicts, beggars and those who fall into both categories around the station’s perimeter.
Police Scotland figures show
almost twice as many reports of drug misuse around Central Station as any other city beat.
And statistics continue to identify the 2.5 square mile area around the station as the most crime-ridden in the country.
In one year alone in the Anderston/City Ward there were three murders, 187 serious assaults, 159 robberies, more than 3,000 cases of shoplifting and nearly 4,000 thefts.
There were nearly 2,000 drug crimes, including 1,661 offences for drug possession and 140 offences for supply.
The needle exchange, clearly, was not operating in a bubble. It was part of a bigger picture of city centre awash with crime, much of it resulting from drug addiction in the first place.
Explaining the decision to withdraw the service, a Network Rail spokesman said: ‘We met with NHS, British Transport Police and Boots in late 2016 to discuss concerns and put in place some control measures that included Boots advising users not to use the station facilities to inject, extra toilet checks by staff to ensure needles were not left, monitoring of persistent abuse of rules by certain service users and barring them from the station.
‘There were other follow-up discussions in the summer.
‘However, we did not see a reduction in incidences and decided to withdraw from facilitating the exchange service.’
In fact, said the spokesman, there was an increase in the