Why has it taken the SNP so long to act on Scotland’s drug deaths?

Britain’s first ‘drug consumption room’ will get the go-ahead later today. A health centre in the east end of Glasgow (where nearly 200 people died from drugs last year) is expected to be used for a pilot project. It will offer nurse-led supervision for drug users while they take heroin, cocaine and other illegal drugs. Sterile needles will be provided too. The NHS and Glasgow City Council, who proposed the scheme, hope that the ‘400 to 500 people [regularly] injecting drugs in public places in Glasgow’ will move off the streets and into the consumption room.

The SNP have pushed the idea for years but it was repeatedly blocked by the Westminster government as drugs law is reserved. The scheme is possible now because Scotland’s Lord Advocate – the equivalent of England’s attorney general and director of public prosecutions rolled into one – has ruled that drug users would not be prosecuted for taking drugs within government-backed consumption rooms.

Prosecuting these addicts would ‘not be in the public interest’, Dorothy Bain KC said. Alistair Jack, the Scotland Secretary, to some surprise earlier this month said that, although he could use licensing laws to block the pilot, he would not.

Consumption rooms are inspired by a similar project in Portugal. Public health officials hail it as a great success and say tens of overdoses are prevented by them every year. Diseases spread by needle sharing are prevented too, they say. But the figures tell a different story: in 2001, when Portugal decriminalised, there were 76 overdose deaths. In the last year of official figures (2021) there were 74. Hardly a roaring success. 

Scotland is the drugs death capital of Europe with death rates nearly treble the rest of the UK. Three Scots die from drugs every single day. There are questions to be asked on why it has taken the Scottish Government so long to act. Overdose deaths rose consistently for seven years after Nicola Sturgeon came to power, whilst rehabilitation funding was cut. No laws have changed, just the legal instruction of the Lord Advocate.

In contrast to England, Scotland’s chief law officer sits within cabinet. So, it is hard to believe she does not act in accordance with the government’s wishes when she can. Which begs the question: why did thousands have to die before the SNP felt able to act?