The Scottish Affairs
Committee has today published the Government’s response to the
Problem Drug Use in Scotland Report published in the last
Parliament.
An all-time high 1,187
people in Scotland lost their lives in 2018. Tackling the issue
had been fraught by public disagreement between UK and Scottish
Governments over their divergent approaches and overlapping
responsibilities. The inquiry, which reported
in November 2019,
provided an evidence-based set of policy recommendations to help
provide a more effective approach.
It concluded that
innovative approaches were needed to address the root causes of
problem drug use. It recommended that problem
drug use should be treated as a public health issue with
cross-departmental support, for the decriminalisation of small
amounts of drugs for personal use, and the opening of a pilot
safe consumption room in Glasgow.
The Chair of the Scottish
Affairs Committee, MP said: ”The predecessor
Committee’s report on problem drug use in Scotland followed one
of the most extensive drugs inquiries in Scotland ever conducted.
We argued that a public health approach will do better at
tackling the drivers of problem drug use, as opposed to the
stigmatisation offered by the current criminal justice approach
that effectively blocks routes to recovery.
We are surprised and disappointed by the Government’s
almost wholesale rejection of recommendations by a Westminster
Select Committee after collecting a substantial body of evidence
from people with lived experience, charities and academics, as
well as legal, criminal justice and health professionals…few of
these will find comfort in this response.
On the proposal for safe consumption facilities, the
Government has repeatedly stressed that this is something that
they do not favour. In their response to our report they
re-iterated the legal challenges to a pilot being established
even though we saw for ourselves how effective these facilities
have been in saving lives in a number of countries round the
world. The report of the previous Committee encouraged the
Government to do what is necessary to approve the proposed pilot
scheme in Glasgow. This would give people using drugs greater
exposure to the full range of services to help them recover. More
lives could be saved.
The Government describes its approach to tackling the
issue as ‘evidence-based’ but offers little evidence supporting
it and fails to address why the evidence we collected should be
discounted. We’d like to see the Government’s evidence, as well
as an outcome document from February’s UK Drugs
Summit.
What is evident is there’s little change in the
Government’s drugs strategy despite the death rate in Scotland
from problem drug use remaining stubbornly higher than any
country in Europe. This fact itself should demonstrate that the
current approach isn’t working. This is undoubtedly a public
health emergency.
The current Committee will examine in more detail the
Government’s response and will follow-up with a round table event
on the topic later in the month. The coronavirus crisis has
presented new hurdles to those seeking recovery and access to
services has become more difficult while the scale of the problem
has not diminished.”
