It puts a huge strain on my family’s life
SCOTT Fowler from Buckie in Moray has been in quarantine in a London hotel for a week and is due to be released on Sunday.
He has worked for Stena for 25 years, and his wife, a nurse, is waiting for him at home.
He said: “I’ve been away from home since the 21st of December, working in a Covid-free bubble.
“I work in Guyana and have been working extended trips for over a year now, throughout this pandemic, and have had no cases on the installation.
“My employer had a gold standard isolation procedure which
ISOLATION eliminates the possibility of Covid outbreak on our installations overseas, yet we are being forced to quarantine for 10 days in London on our return from work.
“It puts a huge strain on family life back home. I feel sorry for my family for going through this as much as me.”
TODAY’S revelations about Scotland’s drug deaths in 2020 bring news that is bad but no longer shocking. Our recent trajectory has been cataclysmic, so bad it brought many curious foreign journalists to Glasgow to send home reports on how our society allowed it to happen. While the rest of the world cottoned on to our national emergency, we did little to properly address it ourselves until January this year, with Nicola Sturgeon’s very welcome announcement of £250million funding over five years. Monica Lennon is right to call the delay in providing such funding “a scandal”. Another scandal, however, lies within her own ranks, as the UK Labour Party has decided, like the SNP did for so many years, to look the other way. Scotland and the wider UK will get no support on drug reform from our entrenched, backwardlooking Tory Government, insisting that continuing the “war on drugs” is the only way out of problems that are plainly and wildly out of control. Labour leader Keir Starmer has an opportunity to step into the void and announce policies that will reflect modern, compassionate and sensible strategies that mirror the approaches of progressive
European countries who reduced their drug problems – notably Portugal.
But instead of slamming the Tories’ disastrous drug policies, which have led to the worst rate of deaths in UK history, he has said they are “roughly right”.
This is a disgraceful dereliction of duty from a party that’s meant to represent the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
The Daily Record has championed the calls for better funding of drugs programmes in Scotland. We demanded better handling of methadone, more rehab beds and far slicker access to treatment.
New funding means this is all achievable – and it’s most certainly better late than never.
But the rumblings from UK Labour now suggest that even a change in Government at Westminster will bring no major reform of the antiquated Misuse of Drugs Act, which is a major blocker to radical reform and moves towards decriminalisation, which the Record supports.
Overdose prevention centres and structured diversion from prosecution systems are measures that would benefit Scotland now.
We should waste no more years waiting in vain for Westminster support to tackle problems that are killing so many Scots today.