Proposals for a drug consumption rooms in Edinburgh have been met with backlash, with MSPs calling it the ‘wrong approach’.
The sites, proposed by the city’s Integration Joint Board (IJB), are located in Edinburgh Old Town; on the Cowgate and on Spittal Street. They were chosen for their proximity to areas with a high concentration of drug-related deaths.
The first experimental drug consumption room, Glasgow’s The Thistle, is a Scottish Government-funded shooting gallery open seven days a week, and has effectively been declared a ‘prosecution-free drug zone’ by the Lord Advocate. It is still in its pilot stage.
State-sponsored drug use
A consultation will be held, likely early next year, for locals to have their say on the proposals. Christine Laverty, the IJB’s Chief Officer, noted: “Such a public consultation will attract substantial attention and raise both hopes and fears within different communities.”
Sue Webber, MSP for Lothian, wrote in the Edinburgh News criticising the proposals as “spending unknown amounts of public money on something to make it easier for addicts to stay hooked.”
She continued: “What they need is rehab to get them off drugs, not the means to keep them in a stupor.”
Annie Wells MSP posted on X: “State-sponsored drug use isn’t the answer. After Glasgow’s experience, another drug consumption room in Edinburgh is the wrong approach. SNP must focus on prevention at the source and back our Right to Recovery Bill.”
Abandonment
Annemarie Ward, CEO of addiction recovery charity Favour UK, wrote: “There is nothing compassionate about building booths where people can inject drugs while leaving them almost no chance of getting into detox or rehab. Glasgow has 18,000 people with drug problems and just 23 publicly funded rehab beds. Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland is scarcely better.”
She continued: “Recovery is not a mystery. Detox, rehab, trauma support, recovery housing, and employment pathways work. We know what saves lives. The problem is political will, not lack of evidence.”
She added: “This is not just a policy debate. It is a moral one. Scotland has chosen to fund safer ways to stay in addiction rather than real exits from it. That is not progressive. It is abandonment dressed up as compassion.
“Every pound spent on a consumption room while detox beds are scarce is a political choice to contain people instead of freeing them. Every time a politician calls that ‘progress,’ they betray the very people they claim to serve.”
‘No-go war zone’
People living near the drug consumption room in Glasgow have raised concerns over an increase in the number of used needles littering the streets since its launch in January.
Speaking to Sky News, former council worker Vanessa Paton, who lives half a mile away from The Thistle, said: “It is getting worse. The new room has appeared, and the problems have escalated with it. It’s a no-go war zone every day and night.”
She added: “The area’s becoming a toilet. That is the harsh reality of it.”
Local resident Angela Scott commented: “It’s become a lot worse. It’s heightened. I’m scared that if I am picking up my dog dirt am I going to prick a needle.”
Scot Govt backs expansion of ‘drug shooting’ gallery experiment