Former drug user Steven Brown was in Glasgow at the weekend to share his experience and show how Scotland can tackle the scandal of drug related deaths.​

In the wake of figures last year which showed that 1,339 people died from drug-related deaths in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon pledged £250 million to tackle the issue. But Auditor General Stephen Boyle said last week that “it’s still hard to see what impact policy is having on people living in the most deprived areas, where long-standing inequalities remain.” I hate to say I told you so but this is exactly what we were warning about last year when the money was announced.

The pandemic has taught us all how much we rely on the smooth functioning of our own health system. But it has also highlighted one of the major problems affecting the sustainability of health and social care – the rising health inequalities in our country between the rich and the poor.

This, in effect is the beauty of devolution, four governments collaborating, sharing information, and making individual, differing decisions for their nations.

There were more than 1300 drug deaths in Scotland last year. Every one a real person, with their own individual story, now cruelly packaged up and included as a number in the annual figures that shame a nation.
Those living in deprived areas are 18 times more likely to die from drugs than those in the least deprived areas.

Facebook-f Twitter Gordon Hector | Twitter Gordon Hector worked as Director of Policy and Strategy for the Scottish Conservatives. Before this, he

Earlier this week, the Auditor General for Scotland Stephen Boyle wrote powerfully about the continuing gap between ambitious policy announcements and actual delivery on the ground in Scotland. On cue, we learned 24 hours later that the ambitious policy announcement by Nicola Sturgeon to create a new nationally run not-for-profit energy company had been scrapped.

There’s a town in Scotland that most of us prefer to ignore. It’s bigger than Ayr or Inverness and contains nothing but poor people, most of whom don’t have jobs. The adults’ health is terrible: in the last couple of years, nearly one in twenty of them has died. Tens of thousands of children live there too, and every stage of their lives, from conception to adulthood, is damaged as a result.

Eddie Barnes | Twitter Facebook-f Twitter After a week where she has led the news agenda on Scotland’s drugs deaths

Susan Dalgety | @DalgetySusan Facebook-f Twitter There’s not a single politician in Scotland who does not profess to be angry