Scots drug deaths hit 1,000 seventh year in a row

The number of drug-related deaths in Scotland has remained above 1,000 since 2018.

National Records of Scotland (NRS) reported that 1,017 people died of drug misuse in 2024, a fall of 155 deaths from the previous year but still more than four times higher than when figures were first recorded in 1996.

Compared to the latest available data for the rest of the UK, NRS calculated that the drug poisoning mortality rate in Scotland is almost three times as high as in England and Northern Ireland, and nearly twice as high than the rate in Wales.

Opioids

After adjusting for age, NRS figures show that “there were 19.1 drug misuse deaths per 100,000 people in 2024”. This, it explained, “is 3.6 times as high as when the series began in 2000”.

As in 2023, “males were more than twice as likely to have a drug misuse death as females”, and opioids, such as heroin and methadone, were “implicated” in 80 per cent of all drug-related deaths.

There were 76 deaths connected with the highly dangerous synthetic opioid nitazine in 2024, more than three times the number of deaths in 2023.

Nine out of ten (91 per cent) drug misuse deaths were classified as “accidental poisonings”, with six per cent classed as “intentional self-poisonings”.

‘Normalised’

Drugs Minister Maree Todd said: “It is welcome that we have seen progress with the number of deaths at the lowest level since 2017, but I know there is still work to be done”.

But Annemarie Ward of drugs charity FAVOR UK said: “Saying ‘lowest since 2017’ makes it sound like the crisis is easing. In reality, 2017 was already a disaster year”.

She added: “Being ‘better’ than a catastrophe is not success – the baseline is rotten.” She warned that drug taking in Scotland had become “normalised”.

Failing strategy

Todd said the SNP Government is “providing record levels of funding for drugs and alcohol programmes”, including widening access to treatment, and supporting the UK’s first drug consumption facility in Glasgow.

Glasgow’s shooting gallery The Thistle, which is open seven days a week, has effectively been declared a ‘prosecution-free drug zone’ by the Lord Advocate. It is still in its pilot stage.

Proposals for drug consumption rooms in Edinburgh are under consideration. Annie Wells, the Scottish Conservatives’ Deputy Party Spokesperson on Drugs, has branded the experiment “state-sponsored drug taking”.

She warned: “Despite pinning all their hopes on drugs consumption rooms being the solution, the fatality rate so far in 2025 – since The Thistle opened – is up once again.”