Josef Stalin famously commented that a single death is a tragedy, but one million is a statistic. It was an acute perception — put to most appalling use by Stalin himself — of the way that both individuals and the wider media process news of death. The minutiae of one person’s fate can move strangers to tears, but a distant story of misery told only in large numbers is often easily brushed aside.
The way in which the wider United Kingdom metabolised the recent story of Scotland’s drugs deaths is a case in point. It emerged earlier this month that the country’s drug-related death toll is now 3.5 times that of England and Wales, and leads Europe by a shocking degree; in 2019 there were 1,264 drug-related deaths in the country of 5 million, roughly seven out of ten of whom were male.
The findings have proved a political scandal in Scotland, taking up numerous column inches and leading to the resignation of Joe Fitzpatrick, the SNP minister for Public Health, Sport and Wellbeing. In the rest of the UK the story has briefly touched the news agenda before melting away. It is admittedly a period of unusually feverish political drama, with a new strain of Covid-19 on the rampage and a Brexit deal in the balance until Christmas, but I don’t think that in other circumstances things would be any different. They never are. On my Twitter timeline, Scottish drug deaths — rather like the victims of Northern Irish paramilitary shootings and beatings — scarcely surface at all as a topic of serious concern among members of the London media and professional classes. Nor have they done so for many years.
There are a number of reasons for this, I think. One is that England has become used over the years to the insidious idea that what might be dubbed “Celtic dysfunction” is an immutable fact of life, a bit like the rain. This dysfunction, it is thought, is most often expressed through violence, abuse of alcohol or drugs, although occasionally it snakes into eloquence. At times it may become a topic of heightened cultural interest, as with Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting or Douglas Stuart’s recent Booker Prize winner Shuggie Bain, but that rarely translates into any sense of political urgency. When Scotland movingly or humorously dramatises its pain, the results are praised and savoured, but little sustained effort is made to alleviate the reality.
Along with devolution, another question has arisen: who owns this reality? In Westminster the attitude is that Scotland does, particularly with the SNP in charge: if they want to claim Scotland, the thinking goes, they can take responsibility for its human misery as well. But the truth is that neither Holyrood nor Westminster owns it fully: an effective drugs policy appears to have fallen down a gap in approaches between the two administrations. Where the British Government treats drug abuse primarily as a criminal justice matter, the Scottish Government increasingly regards it as a health emergency, leading to the Home Office blocking proposals for a “safe consumption” facility in Glasgow.
For drug users, the two opposing policies seem to represent either punishment or what might be called despair management. It may be that neither offers a satisfactory outcome. The Orwell prize-winning Scottish writer Darren McGarvey — who himself overcame addiction to drink and drugs — has eloquently argued that the punitive approach does not work and that a form of decriminalisation would give the authorities more policy options. But he also says that the SNP’s “harm reduction” model is itself flawed, and will lead to continued deaths: the SNP has actually cut drugs services and reduced spending on rehabilitation facilities, which are most likely to offer addicts a decisive path out of addiction.
There are no easy solutions, since many potential elements may feed into a drugs crisis: family dysfunction, economic deprivation, the easy availability of drugs, the fragmentation of community, a history of criminal offending, a spiral of shame and the individual’s sense of his or her own loss of meaning in the world.
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