A SCOTTISH drugs consumption room campaigner has spoken of his delight at being offered a place on a course at Glasgow University.
Peter Krykant, who was frustrated with the legal wrangle over "fix rooms", created his own in the form of a converted minivan that would go to different areas of Glasgow.
The 45-year-old left school at the age of 14 with no no qualifications and was a rough-sleeping street drug user by 19.
He spoke to Glasgow Live about starting a postgraduate Substance Use course at Glasgow University later this month, saying: "It's a bit of a dream just to have a student ID for Glasgow Uni.
"There’s certain little moments for me where I just need to pinch myself a bit, thinking where I am just now. As somebody who was street homeless, out sleeping in doorways and coming from my background which wasn't one particularly of hate in my direct family but one where I was raised on a lot of ingrained ideas of religion and about people from different backgrounds that were ingrained throughout for family.
"Where I was, if you were anything other than heterosexual protestant there was something not quite right with you, that was kind of the general attitude. And that wasn’t just like a family thing, that was an environmental society thing around me."
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The dad-of-two went on: "We were all running about as very young kids singing sectarian songs and talking about people from backgrounds from places like Pakistan etc using every derogatory terms and real sort of tribalistic gang cultures. Hit first and ask questions later type attitude.
"I was raised on that and I was also an intravenous heroin user at a young age. These sorts of things don’t tend to happen for people with my type of background."
The Scottish Government has long been in favour of drugs consumption rooms, which would provide a safe area with medical supervision for people struggling with addiction to take drugs.
But the UK Government has stood against the idea, refusing to grant a waiver to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 that would allow for the users and staff to be protected from prosecution.
The first facility was planned by Glasgow City Council but other local authorities have expressed an interest.
Lasy year, Krykant obtained what he describes as his "dream job" as a Project Leader with Cranstoun, a charity that delivers a drug and alcohol recovery service for adults in England.
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The requirements of the Substance Use course are to have achieved at least a second-class Honours degree in a relevant discipline but Krykant believes his experience on the issue helped him secure a place.
He said: "When the opportunity came up at the university, I didn't even think I'd get in to be honest. My highest level of qualification is SVQ3 Level 3 and this is a postgrad course.
"I think given my experience and work and I’ve also got a HNC at college in business. So I think given the fact I’ve got a HNC in business and a SVQ Level 3 and my work experience that was enough to get on the course.
"It's 10 weeks the course. What I want to do after that is continue. It’s quite hard to imagine or fathom that I would ever have a degree or an honour’s degree or anything like that. That would be dream that at some point I could get that."
He added: "I’m doing the course to continue to learn more. I’m new to this field. I think some people forget just how new I am because I got into the limelight really quickly by doing this overdose prevention van. I’d only been in this area for about 18 months then I started that.
"Very quickly after starting to work in the area I just saw how broken service provision was and obviously Scotland having these massively high drug death rates in comparison to the rest of Europe and the rest of the UK.
"Having my own personal experience of losing numerous family members to drug overdose, I just felt really quickly that I was banging my head against a brick wall. It doesn’t need to be like this, there’s interventions that we could be operating that would save so many lives. So that’s why I went and done that.
"But you could say that I’m still new to all this. That’s another big reason that I want to get on and do more education and study."
Last year, Krykant and Scottish Drugs Forum chief executive David Liddell OBE said the fact no prosecutions have resulted from Krykant van shows the Scottish Government could give the go-ahead for the facilities.
“When I ran the safe consumption facility in Glasgow, there was no police intervention apart from a meaningless allegation of obstruction in the course of a search, so we could go ahead and open these facilities with a simple divert scheme into those facilities,” Mr Krykant told Holyrood’s Criminal Justice Committee on Wednesday.
“I already know Police Scotland officers were seeing people injecting in alleyways and diverting them to my ambulance to come and inject in a safe, supervised environment to reduce the risk of HIV.”
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