Ed: As with leading Coronavirus scientist, Kate Broderick, visionary drug recovery worker Peter Krykant, offers such a positive image of Scotland, that BBC Scotland staff know intuitively to avoid telling viewers about him. In both cases, widely reported everywhere but not by the state broadcaster.

Ludo Thierry

An interesting development in the campaign for safe consumption rooms is being reported on the STV news site – but I’ve seen no similar mention on the beeb Scotland pages. (If it appeared it must have been a ‘blink and miss it ‘ job).

The story involves a seemingly visionary Scottish activist who would appear to be in the mould of that fine tradition of Scottish visionary activists such as Mary Barbour and John Wheatley. Mary and John – operating in a careful and disciplined manner – ‘pushed’ at Westminster’s legal boundaries to achieve progressive change via the Glasgow Women’s Rent Strikes in 1915 (whilst keeping public opinion firmly ‘on side’.) From the outline of his plan many sensible Scots will be wishing more power to Mr. Krykant’s elbow, I suspect.

North brit tory MSP Wee Annie Wells has repeatedly called for radical action – Perhaps she’ll have the chance to offer herself as a human shield to protect Mr. Krykant from the full force of Westminster’s ‘bad’ laws that are maintaining this situation? Link and snippets below:

https://news.stv.tv/west-central/ill-run-my-own-drugs-fix-room-from-a-travelling-van

While the Scottish and UK governments are locked in a stand-off over drugs ‘fix rooms’, one man is taking matters into his own hands.

Drugs recovery worker Peter Krykant intends to open a safe consumption room in a van travelling around Glasgow.

Scotland is in the grips of a drugs crisis, with a record number of deaths last year, while two major summits were held last week.

The Scottish Government has been calling for powers to open a facility where users can take cocaine and heroin safely, but drug policy is not devolved and its requests have been rejected by the Home Office.

Mr Krykant said he had been left frustrated by the lack of new measures to tackle the crisis and plans to hit the road within three weeks.

Mr Krykant said: “We’ve been talking about this for over four years. The initial proposal to set up a safer consumption room within Glasgow was in 2016 and that was blocked.

“It’s been continuously blocked, so we have to have some activism to move this forward.”

There are more than 150 drug consumption rooms around the world, with no reports of fatalities.

After an initial crowdfunding webpage was taken down, Mr Krykant has been raising money and spreading the word through social media.

He said: “We would be providing clean injecting equipment, clean sterile water and, most importantly, we would have [overdose treatment] naloxone kits.”

Mr Krykant said his commitment to the project had cost him his job, and said he was saddened that he felt forced to take drastic action.

He said: “If you want to come and arrest me for running an internationally recognised, evidence-based approach to reducing the harm’s caused by drugs and keeping people alive being a former injecting drug user and street homeless myself, you’ll need to come and do it.”