LESS than three weeks ago, Glasgow’s drugs and HIV crisis was given a painful if timely exposure on national television. Footage was shown of the debris that results from heroin being injected in plain view - discarded needles and syringes in public places where young children might find them; a city-centre lane strewn with needles, within sight of Central Station.
Glasgow’s needle exchange place, which had distributed more than 40,000 clean needles since its inception, has been closed down. The TV report, quoting yet-to-be-released official figures, disclosed that the city’s HIV rate among drug users had at least trebled in two years.
Moreover, health authorities say that between 400 and 500 people are injecting themselves in the city streets on a regular basis.
All of this is why today’s intervention by Aileen Campbell MSP, Scotland’s Minister for Public Health and Sport, is as timely as that Channel 4 News item: she has again given her backing to a call by Glasgow City Council for a safe consumption room for the city’s drugs users. Such facilities exist in 70 countries across the globe, but not one of them in the UK, because, she says, of “outdated laws that the UK Government must either change or devolve to Scotland”.
Last summer the UK Government went against the advice of its own advisory body, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, to consider launching drug consumption rooms. The Government said it had no plans to do such a thing but it did at least leave the door open for local authorities to deliver services to meet local needs.
Safe consumption rooms, or "shooting galleries", can be an easy target. Critics allege that they are really just a means of the state helping adults to consume illegal drugs. Even some drug users are sceptical, one former addict telling the BBC last year that a safe room would not have helped him, and that “abstinence from all drugs is the only way to begin recovery”. Would that it were that easy for many addicts.
The SNP MP for Glasgow Central, Alison Thewliss, pointed out last month that Scotland witnessed 867 deaths from fatal drugs overdoses in 2016, the highest total in Europe. She herself has seen drugs being injected close to her office. The complex health issues for those who inject are becoming ever more alarming, she added. Society at large cannot afford to continue to sit on its hands any longer.
Mrs Campbell’s experiences in Australia are worth reading. The Victoria state government, inspired by the positive results achieved by a safe-injecting room opened in Sydney in 2001, is to launch a similar project in a Melbourne neighboorhood in June. The Victorians, she says, are taking a health-led, evidence-based approach, and have not shirked from a decision that might invite criticism or make some people uncomfortable at first. They also worked closely with the local community to address their concerns and explain why the facility is needed.
Mrs Campbell also points to the success of the Sydney project: more than 900,000 injections supervised, and nearly 6,000 overdoses managed without a single death.
There is no question that many people in Glasgow would feel uncomfortable at the idea of a safe-injecting room being opened in the city. Many would register point-blank objections, doubtless for the principled reasons. There would also be much faux-outrage from tabloid newspapers. But that does not detract from the inescapable situation: that there is a crisis, that too many people with chaotic lifestyles are suffering, and that we cannot continue to look the other way. Safe-injecting rooms, established after the local community has been fully engaged with, are surely an idea worth pioneering, a mature, progressive means of helping those with chaotic drug problems. The increasing sharing of dirty needles in city-centre lanes and elsewhere across the city and its appalling impact on HIV figures warrants a pioneering approach.
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