IT hasn’t been a good month for Glasgow. Trouble at the football, fire at Central Station, and now a fresh set of appalling drug deaths figures.
Glasgow recorded 243 drug deaths in the past 12 months, according to figures released by the Scottish government. The overall picture was grim with a total of 1,146 in the country as a whole (an 8 per cent rise), but the biggest spike was in Glasgow.
One of these miserable deaths occurred outside the Thistle, the SNP government’s ‘safer’ consumption room, where users are free to use illegal drugs in a hygienic environment with medical professionals in attendance. The man’s body was found on a Sunday morning less than two weeks ago.
The Thistle opened in January 2025 as a three-year pilot programme. It followed the example of the unsanctioned Drug Prevention Centre set up in an ambulance by Peter Krykant in 2020. It was green-lit from a legal standpoint after an intervention by the Lord Advocate, who stated it would not be in the public interest to prosecute individuals using drugs in facilities such as the Thistle.
With opening times of 12 hours every day, the Thistle’s users consume pre-obtained illegal drugs, mainly heroin and cocaine, in partitioned booths. In its first year, staff reported 642 registered users, nearly 10,000 ‘injecting episodes’ and 108 ‘emergencies’. It is expensive: it’s estimated that each ‘hit’ in what sceptics call the ‘shooting gallery’ costs the taxpayer £362, and each user more than £3,700.
The Thistle has always been controversial. Local people have protested about an increasingly dangerous environment around the facility with dealers moving in to target users. ‘Numerous residents have purchased baseball bats because they feel unsafe,’ said a local quoted in the Sun. Some question whether it makes things worse: in the wake of the new figures, the Scottish Conservatives’ Annie Wells said ‘state-sponsored drug taking is adding fuel to the fire’.
The criticism is unlikely to derail the project, and the new figures will be batted away. There is a powerful belief system at work here. For many well-intentioned people, the idea of treating or helping users of illegal drugs rather than punishing them and thereby discouraging them from acquiring the habit in the first place is an article of woke faith.
The counter-arguments are these. First, there is no such thing as safe drug use, and a state-sanctioned drug facility normalises and even legitimises life-threatening behaviour (and not just the life of the user but their family, friends, and potentially anyone they come into contact with). It propagates the idea that the only dangerous aspect of drugs is unhygienic use. It removes the unfair stigma of drug use, supporters say, oblivious to the irony that that very stigma, fair or not, was once useful in stopping people from getting involved in drugs in the first place.
Perhaps most importantly, ‘safe’ consumption rooms relieve drug users of any responsibility for their actions and reinforce the idea that they cannot help themselves. The message is always that taking drugs is never the user’s fault; they are always victims who deserve and need the state’s sympathy and care. Anyone who questions these shibboleths is cruel and heartless.
Arguing that drug consumption rooms exacerbate the problem can feel like swimming against a strong current, like walking into a gale. And advocating strict enforcement of drug laws and serious penalties can seem hopeless. For the young, and even not so young, these are almost illogical positions. Witness the high-flying Greens who have promised to decriminalise all drugs if they gain power. This policy may not be central to their recent success, but it doesn’t appear to have done them any harm.
Expect entirely the wrong lessons to be learned from the latest dismal figures, then. No one in the Scottish government is likely to mention Japan and South Korea, where the ‘stigma’ against drug use is alive and well – and keeping people alive and well. Policing is assertive and effective and penalties are severe. The idea of a safe consumption room where the government will help you break the law would be incomprehensible. No one in government will cite the figures of drug deaths in these two countries, which are so low they are barely worth compiling. Nor is it likely they will reflect on the safety and security and general health of these largely drug-free societies and the manifold benefits for all.
Expect no retreat from those entranced by their own visions of moral superiority and sense of mission. And since the Thistle is a government-endorsed scheme which cannot be adjudged a failure, expect swift dismissal of any criticism. However bad the overall statistics are, it will be argued that they would have been even worse without the Thistle. SNP Drugs Minister Maree Todd, in her response to the new figures, has already pre-empted opposition by citing the Thistle as an example of an ‘initiative already saving lives’, describing it with pride as a pioneering project, ‘the UK’s first safer drug consumption room’.
Expect the experiment to continue, expect more consumption rooms (another is planned for Edinburgh), expect more talk of treatment and ‘compassion’ for the ‘victims’ of drugs (the users), expect more ignorant arguments about how strict enforcement of laws has failed, when in fact any such policy was abandoned decades ago.
Expect all that. Expect more death.
