I suspect most people would define “being on the right course” as something which shows signs of improvement or progress which suggest goals are in sight.
So, this week when Scottish health minister Neil Gray claimed his government was “on the right course” in tackling drug addiction, you would expect him to have supporting evidence.
But Neil Grey was not unveiling the success of a Scottish Government initiative, but responding to the news that the number of drug deaths in Scotland last year has risen by 121 to 1172, as if it was any comfort that last year’s death toll was the lowest in five years.
Drug fatalities have been rising since a low of 224 in 1997, but what really stands out is the rapid acceleration from 614 in 2014. The increase to 706 the next year coincides with Nicola Sturgeon’s government cutting drug service budgets by £15 million and over the following five years deaths nearly doubled to 1339. What Ms Sturgeon euphemistically called “taking our eyes off the ball.”
This time last year, then Drugs Minister Elena Whitham displayed remarkable complacency in claiming the ‘tide was turning’ but at least she could point to a small decline to support her assertion. This week, Neil Grey had nothing to offer except peddling a myth.
Worse, he denied addicts were being refused rehabilitation and instead kept on methadone, and was thoroughly and deservedly embarrassed when ITV reporter Peter Smith showed him an interview with an addict with just that experience.
Implicated in 514 deaths last year, methadone is a greater danger than heroin, yet it is still SNP’s primary route and astonishingly is now the main treatment for cocaine addicts, like the poor woman in the interview. She wanted rehab and all she got was a heroin substitute.
This refusal to understand the havoc the SNP’s addiction to the methadone programme is wreaking has finally worn out the determined campaigner Anne Marie Ward, the CEO of charity Faces And Voices Of Recovery UK, who is now stepping back from campaigning because she was “tired of hitting her head against a brick wall” of a government whose answer to drug addiction is more drugs.
England has around the same proportion of regular drug users as Scotland, yet fatalities are almost three times lower so it can only be because our services are three times worse, and the death rate will remain tragically and stubbornly high while the SNP is content to park addicts on drugs, legal or otherwise.
They are under the deadly misapprehension that the new consumption room in Glasgow’s East End will make a significant difference, but how will that dent Edinburgh’s drugs epidemic, which has claimed two lives a week for the past three years?
The Scottish Conservative Right to Rehab Bill promises to change this by guaranteeing treatment within three weeks of a doctor’s recommendation, but of course with treatment budgets slashed by the SNP it will cost money to introduce.
Having frittered away so much money on vote-buying giveaways, the cash has run out so maybe that’s one reason the SNP has so far failed to back this life-saving commitment.
Whatever course the SNP thinks it’s on, it’s not the road to recovery. Not for their political fortunes and certainly not for victims of addiction.
