There must have been singing and dancing within the Scottish Government at the news Annemarie Ward has decided to step away from the frontline of the battle against drug and alcohol addiction. 

During her tenure as chief executive of the addiction charity Favor (Faces and Voices of Recovery) she has become Scotland’s most effective advocate for marginalised and disadvantaged communities. 

Lately, though, it’s seemed that her most implacable enemy is the Scottish Government. To no-one’s surprise, Scotland’s latest addiction figures showed that the number of deaths caused by drug misuse had increased year on year by 12%. 

A total of 1,172 people died in 2023 – up from 1051 the previous year. Those in Scotland’s most deprived areas are 15 times more likely to die from drug misuse. 

After 17 years of SNP government, Scotland remains unchallenged as Europe’s drug deaths capital.  

The arrogance, incompetence and cruelty of the Scottish Government was evident in the response of Neil Gray, the Health Minister. Mr Gray said: “I believe we are on the right course regarding the interventions we are making.” 

Health minister Neil Gray

Last week, Ms Ward said: “I’m done battering my head against a brick wall. I’ve been doing it for five years now. Enough is enough! Nobody in charge is listening. I can’t continue shouting against government drug strategies that focus almost entirely on keeping people addicted instead of getting them free from dependency.”

Ms Ward has consistently challenged the Scottish Government’s shameful approach to addressing the annual death toll which can be summed up thus: “Just give the scum more drugs to subdue them … but make it look civilised and call them ‘safe’ consumption rooms.” 

The SNP’s glove puppets in the print and broadcast media can then be relied upon to welcome their policy of giving heroin addicts methadone. Ms Ward has long advocated for a proper sobriety programme, including more rehab beds. As she’s consistently proved, only this can give an addict a real chance of being drug free.  

The SNP often proclaims its revulsion of the Tories. In reality, however, Scotland’s working class – especially the poorest – is its real enemy. 

Ms Ward is herself a recovering addict and has often told them that their methadone programmes merely condemn victims to a lifetime of “managed” addiction. This is because the SNP’s thick middle-class elites don’t think these people are worth the time and cost required to free them from addiction. 

Never forgotten
TWO years ago in George Square, Glasgow, along with a few hundred others, I lit a candle for those who had lost their lives to addiction, including friends and members of my own family.

Several stepped forward to name lost sons and daughters, mums and dads. In this way they were according them the respect and dignity that the SNP has stripped from them.   

Neil Gray, in his rambling and incoherent response to the latest drug-death numbers, had cited the rollout of “life-saving naloxone” as well as other interventions as evidence that the SNP was taking this seriously. What a chancer. 

At that event in George Square, one survivor described being “naloxoned” on a number of occasions. Naloxone is the magic bullet of choice for the Scottish Government and all those highly-paid executives in what has become a swollen and lucrative addiction sector. 

When given intravenously or injected, naloxone works within minutes to combat breathing difficulties caused by opioid ingestion. Annemarie Ward thinks naloxone can never be a sustainable, long-term response to addiction. 

Annemarie Ward

“Naloxone is like an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff,” she said. “In fact, it’s not even as good as the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. At least the ambulance will take you to hospital to get some sort of treatment. 

“What we’re experiencing in Scotland – particularly in Glasgow – is young men and women being administered naloxone as many as eight times a week. We know of one lad two months ago who had been brought round by naloxone eight times that week, then just dusted down and packed on his way. 

“If you had a heart attack and were brought round by a defibrillator you’d be taken to hospital and then started on an intense programme of treatment. But because these are drug addicts we just pap them out again. It’s as though they’re simply not worth all the trouble.”

Career politicians
SIMILAR to the sharp rise in lobbying firms, the addiction sector is a shape-shifting entity filled with chancers who are expert only in mouthing the dismal argot of civic Scotland. Ms Ward describes them as “policy actors” who make careers out of kicking cans down roads. 
None of them have ever supported Ms Ward’s Right to Recovery Bill which would give addicts a legal right to residential rehab; community rehab; stabilisation centres; and detox and harm reduction services. 

Making it into Scots law would be a gamechanger, but only the Scottish Tories have taken it seriously. This is because the Scottish Government have achieved what many of us had believed to be impossible: make the Tories look more sympathetic to working-class communities than the SNP. 

Scotland’s addiction quangos remain in position and hang on to their government-funded salaries and grants by basically never disagreeing with anything their paymasters say in their lamentable efforts to address addiction.  

Ms Ward once spoke to me of her suspicions that the quangos were advising the government not to back the Recovery Bill because it wasn’t their idea. 

“They have a pre-determined set of outcomes before they conduct their consultations,” she said. 

Poor outcomes
Ms Ward also recalled an academic expressing to her his fervent wish to “give the poor the money we spend to study them”. 

Like many others I’ve spoken with who are serious about addressing addiction, Ms Ward is also at a loss to understand why the government and their addiction sector lickspittles are dismissive of faith-based pathways to recovery such as the 12-step programme of Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous. 

This is rooted in the SNP’s sinister and troubling dismissal of anything that speaks of faith, especially Christianity. Ms Ward thinks this is also true of the addiction industry. “They have an implacable prejudice against anything and anybody rooted in a Christian background or who gets well in Christian rehab.”