By Professor John Robertson OBA
Don’t be deceived. Reporting today’s 2% fall in suspected drug deaths, the Scottish media will tell you:
This is insignificant,
the reduction has stalled’
or recent figures are higher than they were in 2022 or 2023.
Those interpretations are either stupid or deliberately misleading.
A one year variation when looking at data such as these is not important but a trend over 4 or 5 years is. The trend is down and down significantly by around 20% in 4 years.
The dramatic dip in the annual variation from the end of 2020 until the second half of 2022, is a pandemic effect of the kind we have seen in a vast range of health and economic data graphs.
Drug users were particularly likely to die from Covid and from lockdown measures.1 Some of those deaths would be recorded as Covid deaths thus reducing more quickly the number of deaths recorded as drug deaths. So what we have is not a recent increase, in any meaningful sense, but a return to the trend.
Sources:
Talking-up Scotland 
That’s very strange because I’ve just read somewhere this morning – it may have been the Herald but I deleted the email so can’t verify – that Scottish drugs deaths were at an all time high. Found it. Twas the Herald, but it was alcohol deaths.
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