A NEW Home Office review into Britain’s drug policy must consider Glasgow’s request for a drug consumption room, one of the city’s MPs has said.

Yesterday morning, Home Secretary Sajid Javid announced that Professor Dame Carol Black would lead a major review into the links between drugs and serious violence.

The first phase of review will look at who drug users are, what they are taking and how often, to build what the Home Office described as “the most in-depth and comprehensive picture of this issue to date”.

It will be used to “build on existing government strategies to combat drugs, serious violence and serious and organised crime”.

It comes as London is gripped in a knife crime epidemic, which has been largely blamed on drugs.

While policing is devolved to Holyrood, the Misuse of Drugs Act is wholly reserved. Any changes to that law, changing the classification of substance, could have a major impact.

Previous calls to change the laws to allow Glasgow to have a “fix room,” where addicts would be able to inject illegal drugs under medical supervision, have been rejected by the Home Office.

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Glasgow Central MP Alison Thewliss said she hoped this review could lead to “meaningful action”. She added: “It’s abundantly clear to me, and countless agencies and charitable organisations based in Glasgow, that current services are failing to reach drug users in Glasgow, which is why we have asked for a legal exemption to allow for the piloting of a Drug Consumption Room. The Home Secretary however is clearly not interested.

The National:

“Drugs policy is reserved to Westminster. If Mr Javid is keen on undertaking a review of drugs, with specific reference to how drug use is linked to serious crime, he must take a view of all the issues in the round. DCRs don’t just offer benefits from a public health perspective.

“If we can encourage drug users to engage with support services, we can look to simultaneously address the link with violent crime.

“The Home Secretary has so far refused to visit Glasgow and witness for himself the issues facing drug-users and the wider public.

“If he is serious about putting together a coherent strategy on drugs, he needs to engage with areas where the problem is most pronounced.

“To do otherwise would be a dereliction of responsibility to my constituents”.

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Black is the principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, and has previously provided expert advice to the government on the impact of drug addiction.

She said the second phase of the review will be determined once she has reported her initial findings to the Home Secretary this summer.

“There is a great concern about serious crime and particularly about knife crime, and the recent statistics do show that it is at a very high level at the moment.

“I think we also know from the evidence collected that drugs are a very major reason behind this increase in these dreadful statistics.

“And therefore my review, I hope, will really look at this area in great detail, to be able to probe the drug contribution to the increase in knife crime.”

The number of fatal stabbings in England and Wales is at its highest level since records began in 1946, official figures show.

There were 285 killings by a knife or sharp instrument in the 12 months ending March 2018, according to the ONS.

It was revealed132 of those were in London – the most in the city for 10 years if you exclude terror attacks.

Although Scotland’s murders have fallen to their lowest level since 1976, proportionately, per head, Inverclyde was the worst place for killing in the UK, at 14 per 100,000 people.