Professor John Robertson OBA
BBC Scotland‘s website is headlining the vote in Holyrood yesterday which rejected the Conservative Party’s proposed bill that would have given people with drug and alcohol addictions the legal right to treatment.
The report opens with
Former Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross, who tabled the Right to Addiction Recovery (Scotland) Bill, said the legislation would have saved lives. However, opponents said the proposals risked overburdening already stretched services.
No evidence for either of these claims if offered and the author has little choice but to tell us, at same point, even if later, the facts which make the clear the complete lack of need for the Bill and it’s purely political intent which was to provide opposition parties with a stick to beat the SNP with.
12 paragraphs down we read:
Scotland has recorded the highest number of drug deaths in Europe for the past seven years. There were 1,017 drug misuse deaths in 2024, down by 155 on the previous year.
There were 607 suspected drug deaths, external in the first six months of this year, 18 more than during the same period of 2024.
Alcohol deaths fell last year to the lowest number since 2019. Official figures showed 1,185 people died from alcohol-specific causes in 2024, a 7% decrease from a 15-year record high in 2023.
It will be some way down the page before you see the graph above which tells you unambiguously that drug deaths in Scotland are plummeting, rendering some of the above claims a desperate attempt to hang on to the bad news so loved by MSM and the opposition parties.
It will be 33 paragraphs before we see this:
In an effort to drive down drugs deaths, the UK’s first legal drug consumption room has been opened in Glasgow. NHS Scotland has also increased the use of Naloxone, a drug that can temporarily reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.
The Scottish government has set a standard that 90% of people referred for help with problematic drug or alcohol use should receive specialist treatment within three weeks.
In the three months to June, external, 94% of community-based referrals were seen within the target timeframe.
Even this news of the Scottish Government’s achievements is grudging. The Naloxone programme was a ‘World First‘ by the SNP which has slashed hospital admissions and saved thousands. The 94% target-busting treatment programmes have been doing so for years now.
The BBC report then finishes by trying to recast the above clear success as failure with selective comment, including from Anne Marie Ward, to lie that the 94% success-rate means NHS Scotland ‘can’t find a bed for those people who are ready to get well.”
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‘The BBC report then finishes by trying to recast the above clear success as failure with selective comment, including from Anne Marie Ward …’
On August 20, 2024, the same AnneMarie Ward took to the Daily Mail to further her campaign against the Scottish Government:
Headline: ‘ANNEMARIE WARD: Catastrophic proof that SNP’s failed approach to tackling drugs deaths isn’t working’.
In the article she writes: ‘Despite repeated warnings and overwhelming evidence, we are witnessing a relentless increase in drug-related deaths — an undeniable consequence of the government’s failed strategies.’ (my emphasis)
She goes on to say this about the Scottish Government’s approach: ‘This approach has proven to be disastrous, year after year Scotland’s drug death toll continues to rise as we witness failure upon failure, leaving families shattered and communities in despair.’
The official statistics on drug related deaths are no longer ‘relentlessly’ increasing, no longer rising year after year – at least not in Scotland. It’s well documented that, by contrast, drug-related deaths have indeed risen by record numbers in England and Wales.
More and better interventions in the past should have been taken here in Scotland to address this awful situation, and still more and better are needed. However, Ms Ward needs to ‘adjust’ her rhetoric to reality: might BBC Scotland remind her of her prior statements about ‘relentless increase’ being an ‘undeniable consequence’ of a failure and ask the obvious question next time?
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