We need a properly funded drug rehabilitation programme - Susan Dalgety

Trainspotting portrays a group of friends - including Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, and Spud as they navigate through life and battle heroin addiction

Our small country of only 5.4 million people has the worst drugs death rate in the whole of Europe by far. And our death rate is 2.7 times the figure in England and Northern Ireland.

Last year, 1172 Scots suffered fatal overdoses, an increase of 121 people from the previous year. And here in Edinburgh – our beautiful, prosperous capital city – 111 citizens died, a 73 per cent increase from a decade ago.

And since the former First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, admitted that her government had taken their “eye off the ball” in 2021, nothing much has changed. People keep dying. Thousands of people.

The classic public image of a drug addict is from the Trainspotting era. Young men injecting themselves with heroin in scuzzy flats on the edge of the city.

But last week’s figures revealed that methadone was implicated in more deaths than heroin. Methadone, an opiate ‘substitute’, is prescribed by the NHS.

As the Royal Pharmaceutical Society argued in a briefing paper, it is “not a cure for addiction but it is a safer alternative to the use of heroin and other illicit opioids.”

Methadone is the cornerstone of the harm reduction policy that Scotland has followed for years now, and which has failed to stop thousands of deaths. Indeed, it causes many of them.

Many users have been on methadone for years and for many it is their first drug of the day.

But during a television interview last week, the Health Secretary Neil Gray could not say how many Scots are on the methadone ‘therapy’ programme.

A quick Google search would have shown him that in 2022-23 the drug was prescribed to “to a minimum of 22,087 people…for the treatment of opioid dependence”.  

Methadone is much cheaper ‘treatment’ than rehabilitation, which must be one of the reasons why the Scottish Government persists in supporting the failed policy of harm reduction.

But as the latest figures show, methadone is as much a killer as heroin, cocaine or the synthetic opioids that are now flooding into our towns and cities. NHS Scotland is as guilty as any pusher.

And as a society, we are guilty of turning our back on the communities where chaotic drug misuse has led to so many deaths.

Drug deaths in Scotland are a class issue. The evidence is stark – people living in the most deprived areas are 15 times more likely to die from drug misuse than Scots living in the best-off neighbourhoods.

The victims of Scotland’s drug crisis are largely out of sight, except once a year when we all wring our hands over their deaths.

We have a choice. Demand that our government stops spending our tax pounds on free stuff for people who don’t need it, such as prescriptions and baby boxes for all, and invest in a properly funded national rehabilitation and recovery programme.

Or we accept that thousands more will die, many from the drug that they got from their local pharmacy.