Professor John Robertson OBA
From Rapid Action Drug Alerts and Response (RADAR) quarterly report July 2025 published today, we can see a monthly fluctuating but steady, long term falling trend, in drug-related hospital admissions, from around 210 per month in July 2023 to around 140 in 2025, a 33% fall which must be easing pressure on wards.
While there will be more than one factor explaining this trend, this seems key:
What is the Naxolone Initiative?
After a pilot phase ending in 2018, the Scottish Government began to embed Naloxone opioid overdose reversal kits across NHS Scotland. Shortly after, the kits which can be administered by anyone, were adopted by Police Scotland, ambulances and prisons, and made available to libraries, community centres, taxi drivers and to the friends and relatives of users.
Scotland was the first country in the world to introduce a national naloxone programme, empowering individuals, families, friends and communities to reverse an opiate overdose.
Anyone in Scotland can now order a free naloxone kit from national charity Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol & Drugs (SFAD) and be trained in its use.
Opioids such as those found in prescription painkillers are now responsible for 81% of all drug deaths in Scotland.
Why are Scotland’s drug deaths not falling faster given the Naloxone scheme’s impact?
County Lines gangs seek new markets along public transport lines, in small towns and rural areas where local dealers can be dominated with threats of extreme violence and a property can be taken over. Using their scale of operations, these gangs can transport and sell more powerful drugs, more cheaply, using couriers as young as 11, to users unused to the low costs and higher strength. Increased drug deaths is a simple and predictable consequence. These same gangs, entirely from English cities, were first reported in Scottish towns, up the east cast rail lines to places such as Aberdeen, Fraserburgh, Inverness and Wick, around 2019, just as Scotland’s drug deaths had begun to plateau and, in 2021, fall.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
I was talking to my friend Rachel a week ago re Auchinleck Rachel and her boyfriend at that time lived directly next door to these Bradford scum and she had had enough with the police doing nothing It was Rachel who got the crowd to kick the scum out so I’m proud of her
I would love to see the same thing happening elsewhere in Scotland
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It would be interesting to hear a fuller account of this to inform those in other communities currently suffering from this plague.
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