by Ian MacWhirter, UnHerd (photo credit: Unsplash)
The latest 11% hike in Scottish drug deaths is a huge embarrassment for the SNP government and its legions of “expert” advisers. For most of the last decade, the party has adopted what it calls a “caring, compassionate and human rights informed” drug policy. This approach has received criticism for merely managing the problem, rather than focusing on abstinence — that is, actually getting people off drugs.
In 2021, then-Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain advised Police Scotland that it no longer needed to prosecute users of Class A drugs, at least for personal consumption. This was seen as an enlightened approach which aimed to lift the “stigma” of drug-taking.
It certainly did that. Turning Scotland into what was effectively a hard-drug tolerance zone did not lead to a significant reduction in deaths. The rate of drug deaths in 2025 was four times as high as in 2000. Scotland’s mortality rate is the highest in Europe, and two and a half times the level south of the border.
The Scottish Government is now backing consumption rooms where addicts can shoot up in “safety”, both from the police and from the diseases associated with needle use. That doesn’t appear to have halted the increase in deaths in Glasgow, where the first so-called “shooting gallery” was opened in 2025.
Maree Todd, the SNP Minister for Drugs and Alcohol Policy, blames the proliferation of new drugs such as nitazenes and what is called “poly-drug consumption”, mostly of “street” benzodiazepines. These provide a significantly cheaper high than opioids and alcohol, now that minimum unit pricing has driven high-strength ciders off the supermarket shelves. However, most of the deaths are among older users of opioids, now known as the Trainspotting generation.