Urgent action needed now or toll will rise

THE Tele’s chilling report on the drug deaths carnage in Dundee last year made for depressing reading.

The numbers will not reduce until complacent local and national politicians take decisive action.

As a drug worker, I know how much good work is going on in Dundee to address drug dependency – but the workers on the ground are lions led by donkeys and their hands are tied in their efforts to significantly reduce this carnage.

Surely Ken Lynn and Shona Robison must realise that a drug misuse commission is kicking the issue into the long grass while the death toll climbs?

They and Robert Peat, the commission chairman, will be aware that the evidencebased approaches they seek are already tried and tested in more enlightened countries and that, most importantly, they work.

We urgently need heroin-assisted treatment for the most chaotic users.

We urgently need a safer drug consumption facility with street drug testing capability, where addicts can use under strict medical supervision.

We urgently need a local residential rehab unit and a state-of-the-art addictions treatment, prevention and support facility.

We need the politicians to demand immediate legislative change is brought in, or prosecution policy changed now, to allow the most contentious of these life-saving initiatives to be implemented.

We simply do not have the time to wait nine months until this commission reports and the inevitable debate on its conclusions, unless we view another 200-plus drug deaths as a price worth paying.

When the synthetic opioid fentanyl and its derivatives (100,000 reported deaths in the USA in 2015-16) penetrates the local drug market, then mark my words, this will be a conservative estimate.

The phoney war on drugs has been lost and until Dundee’s drug dependency epidemic is treated as an urgent public health emergency, more families will weep.

Angry and dismayed drug worker.