NICOLA Sturgeon is now personally getting involved in addressing Scotland’s horrendous levels of drug-related deaths, 1264 at the last count. Second only to America.
I and many others have campaigned about this issue for many decades. Again and again the media headline this horror story, and the Government reacts as always, throwing money at it, £50 million over five years this time around.
The funding is always for short-term and for minimalist solutions, which only address a tiny part of the problem. People with undiagnosed mental health issues continue to self-medicate on alcohol and drugs because they are in great pain. The stress and burden of living in poverty, jobless, purposeless, and trying just to survive another day, in our most deprived communities, where governments of all persuasions have failed miserably to improve people’s lives.
This time, the emphasis is to be on more money for residential rehabilitation beds in expensive, often private clinics like Castle Craig Clinic in the Borders. Forty years of involvement in this issue tells me that up-market, private residential rehab does work to get a tiny number of the 65,000 addicts off their drug use, but that only works for a minority of people.
For most addicts, getting off drugs is the easy bit, in the luxury of a rehab clinic. After getting clean of drugs, they return to the same deprived communities, with the same undiagnosed mental health problems, and are back where they started. They continue to live in poverty, with no jobs, no purpose, and in communities that are the target of the mafia supplying drugs, where so many of their families or friends are also trapped in long-term addictions.
This is no solution to Scotland’s awful drug problem. The celebrities like Elton John or Russel Brand can return from private drug clinics to pick up and carry on their lucrative careers. A luxury denied to those living in our deprived communities.
What we do need is the safe drug injection facilities as are currently being provided illegally, by a lone charitable campaigner in Glasgow. We need massive mental health intervention services to support the traumatised individuals who were driven into addiction by adverse childhood experiences, that drove them to self-medicate on pain-killer illicit drugs. Recovering addicts need access to housing, jobs and medicinal heroin and many other treatments so far denied to them by Westminster drug policies.
Young addicts need a specialist service, but none exist to my knowledge.
My plea is that our First Minister does what she is good at, listening to the experts – which in this instance must include the drug users, their families and the thousands of those supporting them – to find multiple, workable solutions. We must also look deep into the legal restrictions which so far have prevented the Scottish Government from daring to take actions that could have long ago prevented the needless deaths of so many drug users in Scotland.
Unfortunately, the majority of those featured in the annual drug deaths statistics are older users in their 40-50s. They have limited time left to benefit from new approaches, but a significant number of those now dying from drugs are in their teens and 20s. Surely we cannot ignore them in striving to provide proper health care, instead of condemning them to years in prisons with no real help for their addictions. Drug addiction is a health problem, not a social justice problem. That is the first thing that Nicola and her team needs to get sorted.
Max Cruickshank
Glasgow
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