2 hours agoShareSaveJames CookScotland editor ShareSaveGetty ImagesOfficial figures suggest that Scotland remains the drugs death capital of Europe for the seventh year in a row despite a 13% fall in fatalities.There were 1,017 drug misuse deaths in 2024, down 155 from the previous year.National Records of Scotland said the latest figure was the lowest annual number since 2017. It brings the total in a decade to 10,884.After adjusting for age, there were 191 drug misuse deaths per million people in Scotland in 2024.According to the most recent European data, the next highest rate was Estonia with 135 deaths per million in 2023.Scottish Drugs Minister Maree Todd said the fall in deaths was welcome but that there was “still work to be done”.Experts say they are concerned about the potential for deaths to increase again this year.Kirsten Horsburgh, chief executive of the Scottish Drugs Forum said the recent arrival of deadly synthetic opioids known as nitazenes was “a crisis on top of a crisis.”Suspected deaths early in 2025 “are already higher than they were last year” she said.How did we get here?This is a crisis with deep roots in the social and economic changes which swept through Scotland in the latter half of the 20th Century as the country’s economy shifted away from manufacturing.When the shipyards, steel mills and collieries fell silent, they left a generation of men, whose pride and identity had been bound up with the things they made, struggling to adapt.Society changed rapidly too. The old city slums were cleared, but many people were moved to damp, isolated tower blocks with limited amenities.It was a recipe for joblessness, family breakdown and addiction.In 1972, in a famous speech at the University of Glasgow, the trade unionist Jimmy Reid said Britain’s “major social problem” could be summed up in one word – alienation.Men, he said, viewed themselves as “victims of blind economic forces beyond their control” leading to a “feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies.”Getty ImagesOne way alienation found expression, said Reid, was in “those who seek to escape permanently from the reality of society through intoxicants and narcotics.”Half a century after his speech, Scotland is still grappling with alienation and still struggling with the scourge of alcohol and drugs.High unemployment in the 1980s was followed by cuts to public spending after the financial crash of 2007/8 and the skyrocketing cost of living this decade.By 2024, people in the most deprived parts of Scotland were 12 times more likely to die from drug misuse than those in the richest areas.For many years this was a particularly male problem. In the early 2000s, men were up to five times more likely to die of an overdose than women although that gap has since narrowed to twice as likely.As demand for drugs rose, so did supply. From 1980, heroin from Afghanistan and Iran began to arrive in Scotland in large quantities, with deadly results.The sharing of dirty needles by injecting drug users and the arrival of HIV led to a public health crisis which was graphically depicted in Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel, Trainspotting, and its film adaptation.That crisis evolved in the decades that followed as it became more common to use cocktails of drugs. In 2024 four in five drug deaths involved at least two substances.’Drugs are becoming normalised’Drug overdoses are not the only evidence that Scotland is experiencing a crisis related to alienation. Other so-called deaths of despair are also high.Scotland has a higher rate of suicide than other parts of the UK and some of the highest levels of alcohol-related deaths …
