Playing Politics With People's Lives
NEW: Drug deaths in Scotland needed action, not finger-pointing
— Kenny Farquharson (@KennyFarq) September 12, 2023
My column in The Timeshttps://t.co/Et5l1NKuOH
Kenny Farquharson calls the SNP's behaviour as 'finger pointing', but I prefer to call a spade a spade because what Scottish ministers have really been doing is playing politics with people's lives.
"Egregious failings were clear. And yet at national level the debate generated by the crisis seemed bizarrely out of sync with needs on the ground. Nationally, the SNP made this a constitutional question about whether drug law should be controlled by Westminster or Holyrood."
"But this suited SNP politicians a little too well. Scots were dying and Westminster was to blame. Like so much else, this was all about independence."
Excellent article - well worth a read via link below.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/e0f228fc-517f-11ee-a518-203f78f24415?
Drug deaths in Scotland needed action, not finger-pointing
Lord advocate’s surprise prosecutions policy exposes SNP’s sorry failure to grasp the nettle
By Kenny Farquharson - The Times
Back in 2020, The Times published a landmark investigation into why Dundee was the drug death capital of Europe. For 12 weeks a team of our journalists talked to addicts, dealers and the bereaved. We exposed deep flaws in how public agencies — police, social workers, the NHS, government locally and nationally — responded to a lethal crisis.
As a native Dundonian I found the conclusions disturbing and upsetting, not least because one of the worst-affected communities was the Hilltown, where I spent my early years. For me the death toll was not just a statistic: at one time these were my neighbours and my classmates.
Our investigation produced a clear picture of multiple failures. In essence the Dundee tragedy was a consequence of various public agencies not just failing to work together but actually working against each other.
• Dundee’s drug deaths shame every one of us
For the police, drug abuse was a criminal justice issue. Others dismissed it as a social work matter. In fact it was clearly a public health crisis. Institutional stasis blocked co-operation. Nobody seemed able or willing to get a grip. There were too few beds in NHS recovery programmes for addicts. Funding had been cut. It was nobody’s priority, always somebody else’s problem.
The most damning finding, and the most distressing, was that most of those who died had already sought help. They died within a system that failed them.
Egregious failings were clear. And yet at national level the debate generated by the crisis seemed bizarrely out of sync with needs on the ground. Nationally, the SNP made this a constitutional question about whether drug law should be controlled by Westminster or Holyrood.
A big, complex argument was boiled down to the legality of experimenting with safe consumption rooms. True, a cogent case could be made for a safe space where addicts could take illegal drugs in a controlled environment. But this suited SNP politicians a little too well. Scots were dying and Westminster was to blame. Like so much else, this was all about independence.
This was classic misdirection. In England, big post-industrial cities with the same social and economic problems as Glasgow and Dundee had a fraction of the drug deaths. They did not have safe consumption rooms. Clearly this was not a panacea. And yet consumption rooms became totemic in the debate at national level to the exclusion of everything else.
Why? Two reasons. One, it suited the SNP’s broader political narrative. And two, it deflected attention from the troublesome true causes of a crisis wholly made in Scotland.
Which brings us to Monday afternoon and a landmark statement by Dorothy Bain KC, the lord advocate. “On the basis of the information I have been provided,” she said, “I would be prepared to publish a prosecution policy that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute drug users for simple possession offences committed within a pilot safer drugs consumption facility.
• Users of drug consumption rooms ‘will not face prosecution’
“I have not been asked to sign-off or approve any facility and it would not be appropriate for me to do so. However, prosecution policy is for me alone to set and this policy, and the consequences which flow from it, have been considered deeply and thoroughly.”
Police, she said, could be present at a drug consumption room but their role would be to ensure “those operating the site and those using the facility can be kept safe”.
Wonder of wonders, it did not require independence after all.
We now have a desired outcome without the constitutional change we were told was necessary. Progress was achieved within the devolutionary constraints we were told made it impossible.
We are ten years into this crisis. Why no action earlier? The SNP government says Bain’s predecessor as lord advocate, James Wolffe, was an obstacle. Bain herself says Wolffe said no only because politicians asked him the wrong question.
The practical issue was not whether drug consumption rooms were legal, it was about whether prosecution was in the public interest. The answer to that specific question, as we can now see, was always going to be no. We could have reached this point many years ago.
Here and now, Scots continue to die. New figures this week suggest there were 600 suspected drug deaths in Scotland in the first half of this year, a 7 per cent increase on the same period last year.
• ‘Poor leadership’ is failing Scottish drug addicts
Until recently, this is what had been missing from Scotland’s efforts to tackle the nation’s drug shame. A small number of Scottish politicians at local and national level, across parties, deserve credit for dogged persistence. But think of all the energy wasted on blaming Westminster for years and years when what was needed instead was creative thinking in our own backyard.
Credit too needs to go to Bain, who once more has gone where politicians fear to tread, just as she has done before with prosecution policy on minor drug possession and reforms to how the criminal justice system deals with rape. Bain is one of the most consequential figures in Scottish public life just now, an exemplar of the can-do attitude so often absent in our elected politicians.
How we took so long to reach this point is a sorry tale. It reveals Scotland at its most lamentable: intellectually lazy, institutionally torpid, too willing to settle into the soft upholstery of familiar nostrums.
Progress on drug consumption rooms is welcome. Not least because now we might now be able to deal with other, more pressing aspects of Scotland’s drug shame.
We might finally have run out of excuses.
