A newly-opened, safe drug consumption facility in Glasgow, backed by campaigners and Scots more generally, is the latest target of the political opportunists in Reform UK.
Jo Harvie from SFI explains more.
The councillor for Glasgow Shettleston, Thomas Kerr, published a video on X where he claimed needles and other drug-related litter discarded around an east end supermarket close to the new Thistle Centre in Hunter Street, had been dropped “because of the new drug consumption facility,” where people are able to consume drugs on the premises with supervision and support from health professionals. In fact, the needles were there long before the Thistle opened. A significant problem with abandoned equipment for drug use has been well documented in the area, and was one of the reasons this particular site was chosen in a bid to encourage people not to inject outdoors, where they may endanger themselves and other people.
Both the councillor and the injection facility are new in their roles. The Thistle was opened on 13 January after years of legal wrangling which finally allowed this step towards viewing Scotland’s drugs crisis as a health, rather than a legal, issue. Three days later, Kerr announced his defection from the Tories to become the city’s first representative for the far-right Reform UK. It’s not his first shift rightwards, having campaigned for Labour as a young east end activist, and he was still a teenager when he attended his first Tory party meetings. Aged just 28 now, he’s supercharged the maxim that we become more right-wing as we get older.
There is no doubt that discarded needles in the streets, while a critical problem that must be addressed for the sake of everyone’s health, are not connected to the opening of the Thistle centre, where equipment is used and safely disposed of on site. Figures released in March state that in the first seven weeks of its opening, 143 different people have used the service and several medical emergencies have been managed, with every person who experienced difficulties having recovered.
But, like recent fanciful claims by the far right regarding buffer zones around clinics where abortions are carried out, Kerr’s pernicious claim shows that Reform and their international backers are taking aim at progressive gains in health provision in their pursuit of votes.
Backing for The Thistle was hard-won by campaigners for changes in Scotland’s approach to drugs, as a relatively minimal yet important step towards addressing our catastrophic number of deaths each year related to drug use.
Portugal is one of the reference points for those fighting for a health-based strategy, where more than 20 years ago, in 2001, in the face of Europe’s highest rates of HIV infection, the country decriminalised the use of drugs to allow health workers to distribute clean needles and to establish supervised safer drug consumption spaces, while still prosecuting the sale or trafficking of drugs. This radical shift in position saw rates of new HIV infection plummet, a significant drop in the number of deaths from drug overdoses, and fears that it would lead to a surge in drug use were proven incorrect, with a number of other European countries, including Scotland, reporting much higher rates of addiction.
These steps taken by Portugal are not a panacea. Drug use anywhere is subject to fluctuations in trends – with ketamine use on the Iberian Peninsula escalating for example, but at much the same rate as it is across Europe – and as such successful responses are never guaranteed permanently. More importantly, the drivers behind disordered substance use and addiction are complex and lie, ultimately in poverty, inequality and desperation. Portugal is no utopia.
But the crucial effects of the differing drugs policies are clear. In 2021, Portugal reported 74 deaths resulting from drug misuse, an increase on previous years. In Scotland in the same year the figure was 1,300 people. We have a population half the size of Portugal, and the highest number of deaths from drugs in Europe. Things here have to change.
Studies show the majority of Scots agree with the opening of safer consumption rooms like the Thistle. Glasgow City Council aim to pick up discarded needles within 24 hours of them being reported but are unable to clean up litter on private land such as a supermarket car park.
Jo Harvie
Jo Harvie is a socialist of long standing who has lived abroad for several years before returning to Scotland and re-connecting with Socialists for Independence.