Drugs safe haven plan ‘is not legal’
UK ministers reject ‘shooting gallery’ scheme
PROPOSALS by a Westminster committee to allow heroin ‘shooting galleries’ in Scotland and decriminalise drug abuse have been rejected by the UK Government.
The SNP-led Scottish affairs committee had called for an overhaul of the way substance abuse is dealt with in response to Scotland’s drug deaths crisis.
But the key demands have been rejected in another blow to the Scottish Government’s long-running bid to set up drug consumption rooms (DCRs), where heroin users can inject without the prospect of being arrested.
The committee’s report, published last year, claimed DCRs can reduce health risks and said there was a ‘strong evidence base’ for a pilot scheme to be set up in Glasgow.
In its formal response to the report, the UK Government said: ‘We want to do all we can to stop people having access to drugs that could ultimately kill them. No illegal drug-taking can be assumed to be safe and there is no safe way to take them.
‘At present, drug consumption rooms are not legal in the UK, due to a range of offences that are likely to be committed under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 should a DCR be in place. That would be the case regardless of whether a DCR is piloted or whether there is full roll-out of DCRs across the UK.’
It said there would also be ‘additional challenges’ relating to civil liability ‘were things to go wrong’.
The UK Government also rejected a call from the committee to declare drug-use a ‘public health emergency’
‘Surprised and disappointed’
issue and ruled out treating it as a public health issue rather than a criminal matter.
It said: ‘There is a strong link between drugs and crime, which is why we reject the assertion that the Department for Health and Social Care should lead on drug misuse.’
On the committee’s call to ‘decriminalise the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use
across the whole of the UK’, the Government said: ‘This Government has no plans to decriminalise drug possession.
‘The decriminalisation of drug possession in the UK would not eliminate the crime committed by the illicit trade, nor would it address the harms associated with drug dependence and the misery that this can cause to families and communities.’
The committee had made the recommendations following an inquiry into Scotland’s drug deaths crisis, after an all-time high of 1,187 people lost their lives in 2018.
Nationalist MP Pete Wishart, the committee chairman, said: ‘We are surprised and disappointed by the Government’s almost wholesale rejection of recommendations by a Westminster select committee after collecting a substantial body of evidence from people with lived experience, charities and academics, as well as legal, criminal justice and health professionals.
‘On the proposal for safe consumption facilities, the Government has repeatedly stressed that this is something that they do not favour. In their response to our report they reiterated the legal challenges to a pilot being established, even though we saw for ourselves how effective these facilities have been in saving lives in a number of countries.’