SNP CUTS CAUSE DRUG DEATHS DISASTER

Nicola Sturgeon’s government cut funding for drug and alcohol services from £114mto £53m 2007-2019 and slashed £47m (real terms) to alcohol and drug partnerships

IMG SOURCED FROM THE HERALD

Scottish drug deaths have long been known as a national disgrace. Our little corner of the world is the drug deaths capital of Europe, drowning in a fierce miasma of addiction, hopelessness and despair. This badge of shame has snubbed out thousands upon thousands of lives and left behind grieving parents.

One such grieving parent is Kirsty, who shared her story with Scotsman journalist Dani Garavelli. She painted the picture of her Hogmanay 2019, where she ‘brought in the bells’ at a graveyard. She was visiting the earthly remains of her late son Mark, dead from drugs at just 27 years old.

“I went to his flat after his death and there was nothing in it,” she says, “just a quilt with no cover, and pillows with no pillow cases. He was vulnerable. Who was looking out for him? Why didn’t they try to get in touch with me? Was there any attempt to link him to services?”¹

Who indeed. Her story is just one heart wrenching tale which has become all too familiar.

According to fresh data published by National Records Scotland, over the last five years to 2021 45.2 per 100,000² population in Dundee have been dying from drugs. Glasgow, the economic engine of Scotland’s economy is scarcely any better. Here in my home city on the bonnie Clyde 44.4 per 100,000 population³ perish from preventable death.

But when we look at the country’s abysmal addiction services, it isn’t hard to understand how we have ended up here. Martin Powell, head of partnerships at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation explains that “just 40% those who need treatment are in it”. And according to a report published earlier this year, unbelievably upwards of 60% of services were not providing addicts the option to start treatment the same day they turned up.

The desperate turned away, and a chronically failing addiction services system. Kirsty wondered why there weren’t any attempt to link her son to services that might help him. The answer, sadly, is that under this Scottish Government the system is simply crumbling.

Nicola Sturgeon’s government cut funding for drug and alcohol services from £114million to £53million⁴ between 2007 and 2019. Over that same timeframe Scotland witnessed a surge in drug deaths from 455 in 2007 to 1187 in 2018⁵. That is a rise of 160 per cent for those wishing to know.

With cuts like that, is it any wonder we have the national shame of being the drug deaths hot spot for a whole continent?

Yet despite all of this, Scottish Government Drugs Minister Angela Constance has insisted that despite the plethora of evidence to the contrary, tackling drug addiction remains the SNP’s “national mission”.

“What these heart-breaking figures show is that we need to do more. The national mission is always open to scrutiny and the Scottish Government is accountable.

At the very core of the national mission is about getting more people into the recovery or treatment that is right for them”⁶

Apparently the total lack of progress is proof of the effectiveness of SNP policy. Welcome to the fabulist world of the ruling nationalists, totally deluded amid a serious case of Sturgeonian brassneckery.

The year the SNP took office in 2007 there were 455 drug related deaths in Scotland. It is important to point out that this was part of a gradually increasing trend, the 2007 figure was 8% up on 2006 and frighteningly 103% more than 1997⁷. But what we can see since 2007 is a gradual increase in drug related deaths in Scotland begin to skyrocket; precisely at the time the SNP began slashing at drug and alcohol services.

In fact, at the same time that SNP Drugs Minister Angela Constance was writing angry letters to Priti Patel, demanding more powers (yes, the SNP made it all about the constitution), she was failing to come clean with the public. As Constance penned her nationalist letters to 'set the narrative' to get the SNP off the hook, it was revealed that the SNP had ripped out £47m (real terms) to alcohol and drug partnerships between 2014/15 and 2019/20⁸. The public only finally discovered this truth after a Freedom of Information Request.

2018 witnessed Scotland with a worse drug deaths rate than opioid addicted USA, and the worst in all of Europe. And at that same time, the SNP cut £47m (real terms) out of alcohol and drug partnerships; having also slashed funding for drug and alcohol services from £114million to £53million between 2007 and 2019.

Yet Angela Constance is looking you in the eye and telling you the SNP’s “national mission” to reduce drug deaths is not failing. That it’s not anything to do with them, it’s all Westminster’s fault because it hasn’t transferred the power to set up safe injecting facilities. Amid all of this breath-taking failure, the shadowy figures of mothers like Kirsty haunt the graveyards containing the bones of her dead son.

In George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the principle protagonist Winston writes that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four” early in the book. This motif comes full circle at the end after the torture Winston suffers in the Ministry of Love breaks his soul. Quietly, Winston sat at the Chestnut Tree Café and traced “2 + 2 = 5” in the dust on his table.

This represents the weakening the independence and strength of an individuals’ mind. Big Brother instead forces people to live in a constant state of propaganda-induced confusion. While it would - clearly - be ridiculous to argue the SNP are presiding over a totalitarian state, there is an echo of ‘2+2=5’ with this Scottish Government. They cut drug rehabilitation services, but deny ever having done so. They point to statistical evidence showing no progress, and claim this only proves the effectiveness of their policies. War is peace, love is hate, rising drug deaths shows SNP policy success, failings in areas of devolved competency is Westminster’s fault…and 2 + 2 = 5.

I am sure some time soon I shall wake up and discover ‘The National’ printing a glossy front page spread about our First Minister mercifully deigning to intervene. In 2007 455 Scots died from drug related deaths, as of 2021 it was 1,330⁹. As we wait Ms Sturgeon to take an interest, the dark spectre of drug deaths haunts the land and the bodies keep piling up.

1. Garavelli, Dani (2020), ‘Insight: One mother's story and the scandal of Scotland's drugs death crisis’, The Scotsman, https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/insight-one-mothers-story-and-scandal-scotlands-drugs-death-crisis-3074029

2. The Week (2022), ‘How did Scotland become Europe’s drug deaths capital? Poverty and mismanagement blamed as new data is revealed’, The Week, https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/uk-news/957503/how-did-scotland-gain-the-title-of-europes-drug-deaths-capital

3. Ibid

4. McGivern, Mark (2020), Claims SNP's refusal to fund drug treatment has led to rocketing death crisis in Scotland, Daily Record, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/claims-snps-refusal-fund-drug-23162832

5. Ibid

6. Bol, David, (2022, 28 July), ‘Scotland's drug deaths: Call for UK ministers to stop 'criminalising vulnerable communities’, The Herald, https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/20585544.scotlands-drug-deaths-call-uk-ministers-stop-criminalising-vulnerable-communities/

7. National Records Scotland (2008), General Registrar Office for Scotland, ‘Drug-related deaths in Scotland in 2007 Statistics of drug-related deaths in 2007 and earlier years, broken down by cause of death, selected drugs involved, age and sex. Includes three tables of figures for Health Board areas, and three for Council areas’, https://webarchive.nrscotland.gov.uk/web/20210317081428/https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files/statistics/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland-2007/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland-2007.pdf

8. Peterkin, Tom (2019), ‘SNP under fire for cuts to drug and alcohol treatment programmes’, Press & Journal, https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/politics/scottish-politics/1805898/snp-under-fire-for-cuts-to-drug-and-alcohol-treatment-programmes/

9. National Records Scotland (2022), ‘Drug-related deaths in Scotland in 2021’, https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/drug-related-deaths/21/drug-related-deaths-21-report.pdf