YOUR starter for ten. What is Scotland’s national shame, England’s growing problem and Northern Ireland’s seldom mentioned tragedy?
You should have no problem with the answer because it has been all over the news this last few days.
Drugs is the answer. Well, it is the answer for Scotland and England, because we don’t ‘do’ drugs all that much around here.
Scotland continues to have the worst drug death rate in Europe with 21.2 deaths per 100.000 of the population.
That means that 1,339 men and women and teenagers died last year as a result of taking drugs.
I heard the report on the BBC and, I hope I am wrong, but I thought I detected a slight tinge of superiority in the tone; a 'Sturgeon and Scotland are not always as good as they think they are' tone.
A few days later I heard the BBC report that the figures for drug-related deaths in England and Wales were the highest ever recorded.
Still lower than Scotland but an increase of 54% in the last 10 years. No tinge of superiority in this report, only sadness.
The Scottish minister for drugs policy said the deaths were their ‘national shame’. The report on England and Wales laid some of the blame at successive governments who had either neglected the issue or reduced funding for services.
But that is over there. How are we doing? Not good is the simple answer.
Statistics are a nuisance, and they blunt an issue as much as they reveal it, but they are all that we have and none of us will get in a government minister’s door without them.
Our figures reveal that 13.7 per 100,000 died in 2018, as compared to 2.6 per 100.000 in 2001.
That means that 189 men, women or adolescents died in 2018. A lot but probably an underestimation.
There has been a lot of discussion about stigma around mental health and from my experience the stigma around drug addiction, including alcohol, is way out front.
Came across a case recently where the GP rang up the family to enquire if they would be comfortable with him putting alcohol as the cause on the death certificate.
Compassionate in its way but those half-truths do nothing for the statistics and certainly not for any remedy to the problem.
The Scottish drugs minister said that one of their responses would be to build a 20-bed rehabilitation centre. Not a lot, I thought, until I heard a report that there is presently only something like 16 dedicated treatment beds covering the whole of Glasgow.
I was part of a group that negotiated with Julian Smith on this issue. We were late into the fray, but we managed to get a line into New Decade, New Approach that some British government money would support a new regional treatment centre.
Despite correspondence with our not so new Secretary of State, a referral to the Dept of Health is all that has been received. Not a very new approach and no new deal.
Robin Swann has published a report on mental health. Good stuff but drugs have no great priority within the recommendations.
He has also appointed Professor Siobhan O Neill as Interim Mental Health Champion. I noted that he said her appointment would bring the subject to the top of the policy agenda and Siobhan has certainly profiled the subject.
But, when it comes to drug misuse and drug treatment, every minister who held the health portfolio since the early seventies has promised to do something about drugs and their misuse.
And then the next and the next minister comes into the cave of bureaucracy that is the Dept of Health and the issue is overtaken or pushed aside for something more immediate.
The only thing that remains constant is the rise in the number of drug deaths.
