In the Guardian today:

Thousands of lives could be saved if safe rooms were set up in UK cities where people could be supervised while they get high, the world’s largest review of the effectiveness of drug-consumption rooms and overdose-prevention centres (OPCs) has found.

“OPCs can help save lives in an urgent and growing drug-death crisis in the UK,” said Dr Gillian Shorter, reader in psychology at Queen’s University Belfast, who worked with academics at the universities of Oxford, Kent, East Anglia, West London and Bristol on the study. 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/11/drug-consumption-rooms-could-save-thousands-of-uk-lives-study-finds

No Scottish researchers despite the Scottish Government having called for these 4 years and only this at the bottom:

In 2020, an unsanctioned mobile unit started operating in Glasgow, and the city council and the NHS in Glasgow is due to open the UK’s first official pilot drug consumption centre on Hunter Street in Glasgow this summer.

The lord advocate for Scotland, Dorothy Bain KC, has said she is prepared to publish a prosecution policy “that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute drug users for simple possession offences” inside a pilot facility.

Pilot facility? This one BBC Scotland reported 4 months ago?

The proposed site for the UK’s first sanctioned drugs consumption room has been revealed.

Hunter Street Health Centre in the east end of Glasgow has been earmarked as the location for a pilot scheme. The facility is backed by the Scottish government as a way to tackle the country’s drugs deaths crisis.

The country’s top law officer paved the way for the pilot after she said users of the sites would not be prosecuted for simple possession offences.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-66877763

Why doesn’t the Guardian know about this, still in its favoured UK?

And 7 years ago?

This:

The largest review ever undertaken, of 349 research studies, from across the globe though mostly in Europe, carried out by the Centre for Criminology at the University in South Wales in 2017, found that ‘safe’ or ‘supervised’ injection rooms significantly reduced drug-related harms, dramatically cut mortality and offered a range of benefits for the wider population, in terms of reduced crime, nuisance in public spaces, violence and trafficking.

https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2019-01/180320atisn12038doc2_0.pdf

Was the Guardian’s ‘world’s largest review’ bigger than that above of 349 research studies?

Anglo-centrism.

From Belfast?

Dr Shorter started off at Nottingham Trent University.