Drug deaths: How Scotland regularly fills a 'mass grave' of people who might have lived
Instead of focussing on rehabilitation programmes with sufficient energy, the SNP is actually making it easier for people to take drugs
There are roughly 91 days in every statistical quarter of the year. In the quarter from March 1 to May 31, 2025, there were 312 suspected drug-related deaths. That’s more than three a day, every day. Over the 13 weeks, it is 24 every week.
It is an increase of 15 per cent over the last 13-week quarter. It is similar (4 per cent lower) than the same period in 2023 but 7 per cent higher than that period in 2024. Whatever year you want to take, it is a harrowing number, especially when you give it some perspective.
Just imagine, every week, for 13 weeks in a row there was a train crash between Glasgow Central and Paisley Gilmour Street, or Haymarket and Dundee, or anywhere in Scotland for that matter – and the result was 24 deaths.
Every week. For 13 weeks. And it is getting worse. What do you think the public response would be?
Would we not be demanding that the Scottish Government do something to prevent the mounting loss of life? Would any politician be able to look in the mirror and say “I am doing my best to prevent this daily and weekly roll-call of death” if the numbers just kept being added too?
SNP’s perverse policies
It’s all very well saying that people should not get on the train that might take them to an early death, but few if any of those who make that journey expect early death to be the outcome for them. More often than not, people starting out on this journey think it’s always going to happens to someone else.
By the time they realise they are watching in slow motion their own but sadly inevitable demise, they are often beyond having the capacity to get off that train. They need help. They need to be helped out of their addiction and they need rehabilitation so they don’t think one day they can easily have a day trip without any consequences.
Currently, instead of trying to improve our drug rehabilitation, the policy of the Scottish Government is quite the reverse; indeed it’s perverse. The Scottish Government is trying to make it easier for those addicted to take their daily journey just that little bit smoother, a little less of a trouble.
There’s a pilot in Glasgow for a ‘drug consumption room’, where addicts are given a safe place to take their drugs – the provision of such a service consumes scarce resources that could instead be used to provide rehabilitation that can help people making that daily commute to catastrophe.
It’s like taking away the ticket inspectors, removing the barriers and saying here, try first class instead, it’s a more comfortable journey. When the train crashes, it doesn’t matter which carriage you are in. You are a fatality, another addition to the statistics – even if the journey was that little bit easier because you could inject the drug of your choice or the addictive substitute of the authorities’ choice, you still end up at the destination of death.
Bully-state interventions
Many of the people advocating an easier journey – essentially in the so-called public health specialism – are also quite sanguine if not openly supportive of making access to drugs easier too. Various narcotics would be declassified and in other ways made easier to come by.
Likewise, by making the base cost of alcohol higher through minimum pricing legislation, there is evidence on the street that various drugs are now intentionally made available by suppliers at a cost lower than alcohol so new entrants to drugs become addicted and board that train.
What is the public health response to an alcohol policy that has failed while persecuting responsible drinkers and lining the pockets of the supermarkets? Why, it is to go into denial – for they themselves are addicted to bully-state interventions of directing the behaviour of the law-abiding majority – and increase the minimum price further.
Annemarie Ward, chief executive of the charity Favour UK, which seeks to improve the provision of drug rehabilitation services across the country, has found the Scottish Government to be profoundly difficult to work with, often talking of providing better services only to reduce the number of rehab beds available.
Ward notes that the number of suspected drug deaths in the last three quarters is: Q4 2024: 215 deaths; Q1 2025: 272 deaths (+26 per cent); and Q2 2025: 312 deaths (+15 per cent). That’s a 45 per cent surge in six months. “The flames are rising, the bodies are stacking up, and the state has the audacity to rebrand failure as calm,” says Ward.
The campaigner regularly takes the Scottish authorities to task for saying the situation is “stable” – responding that it is “an obscenity, like calling a mass grave this year as similar to one last year”. Over 1,200 people needlessly dying last year was a mass grave of great shame to Scotland and will become another such mass grave of shame if, as seems likely, it is repeated this year too.
18 years of failure
Scotland having the highest drug-related deaths in Europe is a failing of devolution because, despite having the same laws regarding drug enforcement, the Holyrood parliament has the powers to deal with Scotland’s own problems. It is also a failure for the prevailing “whae’s like us” culture in Holyrood, where trying to do things differently from England is given preference – even when their policies work – and comes at the price of needless deaths.
Most obviously though, it is a failure of the SNP government, now in power for some 18 years and clearly in control of rehabilitation services that it has failed to develop – while focussing on its own addiction towards holding referendums. What an utterly awful trip Scotland is on, and until the SNP is removed that train will crash every week.
Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European parliaments and editor of ThinkScotland.org.
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