Wrongs on road to giving addicts right to treatment
TENSIONS are once again boiling over in the drug crisis debate this week.
The point of contention (or rather, suspicious silence from some) is a draft Bill which aims to enshrine in Scots law a legal right to treatment for addiction.
Scotland’s drug death rate is shameful and looks set to climb further in the coming months.
While discussion around drugs and addiction often sits quite separate from wider debate about public health, addiction and related deaths are the final output of systemic inequalities inherent to Scotland’s health services.
Every Scottish citizen with a health problem has a right to treatment, free of charge, at point of need, but the situation for people with drug problems is a little different.
There is often a lag between when someone asks for help and when that help is provided.
People with addiction issues are also subject, on occasion, to forms of conditionality that someone with flu, or a broken leg, would not experience.
A rights-based approach seems like a no-brainer, surely?
Well, sadly, there’s just far too many political footballs in play currently for influential players in the drug sector to throw their publicly-funded weight behind it.
Some big cheques signed by the Scottish Government have just cleared and nobody wants to be seen advocating legislation the SNP are uncomfortable talking about.
The Tories have effectively backed the proposals but their agenda here is clear – taking ownership of this radical legislation places the Scottish Government under pressure.
The Conservative position is, unsurprisingly, incoherent and acts merely as an exhibition of their opportunism – but that’s politics.
Of course, that the Tories have backed it provides many within the drug sector a better alibi than usual for effectively saying nothing.
With this rights-based approach to treatment, which has been put forward by numerous voices over the last few years, those advocating on behalf of people with addiction issues would have clear instruction on what their clients’ legal entitlements to treatment are, thus creating vital chains of accountability which have been absent in the field for decades.
Since the resignation of former minister Joe Fitzpatrick last year, after another consecutive rise in drug deaths, there has been substantial movement on the issue of drug policy – significant funding and assurances that access to residential treatment will be widened – which has come as a result, not of task forces or quangos, but from highly organised campaigns driven by people with lived experience.
But like now, with respect to the development of a rights-based approach, many of the drug sector’s leading lights said little in response to many of these key developments until the coast was clear.
The near-uniform silence when controversial matters are contested publicly, or when politicians come under fire, speaks to the political correctness which has underscored much of Scotland third-sector for years, but especially over drugs. The organisations regarded as “legitimate” tend to remain quiet until the more seasoned activists – regarded as coarse, overly emotional troublemakers – force change through acts of organised campaigning, often at great risk to themselves.
Only then, once the dirty work has been done by those willing to speak truth to power, do the suits re-emerge, at a politically safer moment, to welcome (and attach themselves to) the wonderful change that has occurred.
Perhaps we should give them the benefit of the doubt. Surely nobody in the drug sector is arguing against a rights-based approach and so, from the deathly silence, we are safe to assume they support it?