A WOMAN who watched her young partner die of health problems related to heroin addiction made an emotional appeal for reform of drugs policy when she addressed delegates to the SNP party conference.
Fiona Gilbertson, pictured, told a fringe meeting yesterday that policies pursued by the UK Government had led to the deaths of many Scots drug users over the last few decades.
Recalling a conversation with her partner in his final days, when they were both drug users in the capital in the 1980s, she said: “My friends who died in Edinburgh in their twenties, died not of drugs but of HIV. They died as a direct result of poor policy driven by fear and ignorance.
“I remember speaking to my partner in his final days. He was 30 years. He hadn’t had a great life. He had been in and out of children’s homes and all sort of stuff went on. He was dying and I was furious. I said this isn’t fair.
“And his response made me incredibly sad and determined to change things. He said ‘Fiona we’re junkies, we deserve what we get’”.
Gilbertson, 55, went on to recover from her own drug misuse issues and later set up an organisation Recovering Justice, to help other users.
She pointed to alternative approaches taken by other European countries focused on seeing drugs misuse as a public health problem rather than a criminal justice matter.
And she underlined how the decriminalisation of all drugs in Portugal, where resources were instead spent on treatment, led to a fall in the number of drug-related deaths.
She said: “I stand here over 25 years after Edinburgh was declared the Aids capital of Europe. Scotland has the highest drug death rate in the EU. It is 42 times higher than Portugal which decriminalised all drugs.
“There is a HIV epidemic in Glasgow among a population of people who have no hopes. Our prisons hold more people who use drugs than there are rehab beds. Scots are dying unnecessarily. They have been collateral damage of successive UK Government’s posture to be tough on drugs.”
Gilbertson was speaking at a meeting organised by Ronnie Cowan, the MP for Greenock and Inverclyde, who is among the SNP politicians backing the introduction of legal drug consumption rooms (DCRs).
The policy has garnered cross-party backing from MPs, but a move to allow the first-ever DCR in the UK – in Glasgow – has been repeatedly rejected by the UK Government, which holds powers over drugs policy as a reserved issue.
Authorities in Glasgow believe the plan would take drugs and needles off the streets, help reduce HIV and other serious health problems, and give users a chance to access the support they need.
The move follows research by free market think-tank the Adam Smith Institute which argued that the UK has fallen behind European nations in its approach to reducing drug harm.
Denmark, Spain and Switzerland are amongst 10 countries in which DCRs are already operating. The centres are aimed at hard-to-reach populations of drug users, including homeless people, those with severe mental illness and those most at risk of spreading diseases through needle use.
Medically-trained staff work with users to reduce harm and sterile equipment is available to protect people from contracting conditions like HIV and hepatitis C.
There were 934 drug-related deaths registered in Scotland in 2017, up 66 – or 8% – on the previous year.
That – the most recent figure available – was the highest level since current records began in 1996 and is more than double the 445 deaths in 2007.
The statistics indicated that Scotland’s drug-death rate is roughly two and half times that of the UK.
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