Data recently published has revealed that in Scotland, drug-related deaths rose by a shameful 27% last year to 1,187. That means the death-toll in Scotland was equivalent to five Lockerbie bombings or fifty 7/7s. It is nearly three times that of the UK as a whole, and, per capita, the drug death rate in Scotland is higher than that of the U.S. Yet no national emergency has been declared. [...]
And the cause has baffled many. Myself included. It may be attributable to a number of factors, including the sharp managed-decline of the industries around which many working-class communities formerly cohered. The mechanisms by which they once lifted themselves out of poverty were sacrificed on the altar of the free-market and replaced with Frankie and Benny’s, American-style shopping malls, casinos and, in Dundee (the drug-death capital) a world-leading design museum — partly funded by the billionaires implicated in the U.S. opioid crisis. [...]
My theory is that the drug problem is worse in Scotland for the same reason the drink, cigarette and life-expectancy problems are worse: the severity of deindustrialisation was that much more acute north of the border because we lacked the political autonomy to mitigate its impact in context-specific ways. Then again, I’m not an academic. Maybe it’s just the weather that’s killing everyone. [...]
Where the U.S. led, Scotland followed. Research published by Scottish Universities in 2018 found that 18% of the Scottish population was prescribed at least one opioid painkiller in 2012 and that “there were four times more prescriptions for strong opioids dispensed to people in the most deprived areas, than to those in the most affluent areas”. Every bit of data available points to a large increase in the prescription of addictive painkillers like co-codamol and tramadol over the last 10-years in the very communities where people are dying.
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