There are lots of people in Scotland who know what they’re doing. The Scottish government need to give them money and get out of the way.

Give people with drug addiction a right to proper recovery. And give charities and communities the freedom to provide it. How to fix Scotland’s drug death shame​.

The debate around how to improve our nation’s health has come round once again, and rightly so as Scotland is facing an obesity issue, with 65% of the population being overweight or obese. We need to have a better understanding of food and improve our overall relationship with food if we want to improve the nation’s health. 

A major new study by health academics has exposed changes in life expectancy in the USA and 19 other western nations between 2019 and 2021, the period of the pandemic. But before we all have our say over what is going wrong on the other side of the Atlantic, shouldn’t we look a little closer to home as well?

Former drug user Steven Brown was in Glasgow at the weekend to share his experience and show how Scotland can tackle the scandal of drug related deaths.​

In the wake of figures last year which showed that 1,339 people died from drug-related deaths in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon pledged £250 million to tackle the issue. But Auditor General Stephen Boyle said last week that “it’s still hard to see what impact policy is having on people living in the most deprived areas, where long-standing inequalities remain.” I hate to say I told you so but this is exactly what we were warning about last year when the money was announced.

The pandemic has taught us all how much we rely on the smooth functioning of our own health system. But it has also highlighted one of the major problems affecting the sustainability of health and social care – the rising health inequalities in our country between the rich and the poor.

This, in effect is the beauty of devolution, four governments collaborating, sharing information, and making individual, differing decisions for their nations.

There were more than 1300 drug deaths in Scotland last year. Every one a real person, with their own individual story, now cruelly packaged up and included as a number in the annual figures that shame a nation.
Those living in deprived areas are 18 times more likely to die from drugs than those in the least deprived areas.

Facebook-f Twitter Gordon Hector | Twitter Gordon Hector worked as Director of Policy and Strategy for the Scottish Conservatives. Before this, he