With its coarse leaves, jaggy spikes and purple blooms – the thistle is known as Scotland’s national flower. Now it is also the name of the UK’s first safer drug consumption facility, opening in Glasgow’s east-end on Monday, 13 January.
Like its jaggy botanical namesake this drug injection centre – almost a decade in the planning – has been a thorny issue. It’s considered bold and beautiful by many though met with more ambivalence by others.
But now, managers claim, it’s time to prove that this approach can work and save lives. They reject criticisms of £2.3m costs, pointing out that specialist services for other health conditions – from cancer to kidney failure – would not be held up to the same level of scrutiny. And they claim that its trauma informed approach will help marginalised people traditionally excluded from services access the support they need.
The service, which will open daily from 9am to 9pm, is designed to reduce overdoses by providing a safe and clean place for an estimated 400 people who inject drugs such as heroin and cocaine in Glasgow’s city centre. It will not provide facilities for people to smoke drugs at this stage, although work is ongoing to develop this service.
Neither will drug testing be available when it opens on Monday, though this is also due to be made available at Glasgow’s Hunter Street complex, where both the Thistle and the assisted heroin treatment service are also based.
While on the premises drug users will not be prosecuted for possession. Those attending can also ask for help to reduce their drug use or access treatment services including drug rehab as well as being able to access support with housing or health services.
Promoting safer drug use
Early this week The Ferret was given a pre-opening tour of the Thistle, with its muted colour palette, sleek reception area and “chat rooms” – a more informal name for consultation rooms suggested by an advisory panel with experience of drug use.
The same panel gave the Thistle its name, advised on its layout and helped recruit staff.
Inside the injecting space, eight brightly lit mirrored booths dominate behind a nursing station where injecting equipment will be provided to drug users, who bring their own drugs with them.
Initially they might pass for vanity tables. But the large floor space behind them – where staff can give revive someone if they collapse due to overdose, along with oxygen tanks and access to an ambulance bay, are a reminder of the serious purpose of this facility.
Through the doors from the recovery area is a lounge with comfy chairs, a bookcase and kitchenette where people can make tea and coffee. The aim is to offer some respite from complicated and often harrowing lives after using the injection space and support from harm reduction workers, some of whom have experience of drug addiction.
In this still empty room there is a feeling of calm that belies the political battle it took to get to this stage. First proposed officially in 2016, in response to Glasgow’s HIV epidemic affecting injecting drug users, permission was initially blocked by the Home Office under the then Conservative government.
In August 2023 Westminster’s Home Affairs Committee recommended pilots of safe consumption facilities in areas across the UK where local government and others deem there is a need. A month later Scotland’s Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain confirmed that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute and the safe consumption room was given the green light by Glasgow City Council with the backing of the Scottish government.
“Politically, all eyes are now on Glasgow,” explains councillor Allan Casey, city convenor for workforce, homelessness and addiction services. “Some people are watching with skepticism. Some people are watching with interest because they want to do the same thing as we’re doing.
“So there will be a huge amount of pressure on the service to make sure we get it right, not just for the service as a whole, but for the individuals who will be using it. We know across the world that the safe consumption rooms do work. But we need to demonstrate that this works within the context of the UK.”
Similar overdose prevention sites and consumption facilities have opened at more than 100 sites in 11 countries over the last 30 years.
Ahead of the new Glasgow service opening, The Ferret visited one such project, the Mosspark Consumption and Treatment Service in Toronto, to find out what difference its community-focussed approach can make. Our podcast follows drug users and staff through a day-in-the-life of this service, exploring its roots in civil disobedience and its ongoing fight for recognition.
Yet even managers here claim that in the midst of both drug death and housing emergencies in the city it is “important that we don’t think that this, on its own, is a silver bullet for the drug related death crisis in Glasgow”.
“It’s another part of a system of care, another piece of the jigsaw, responding to a very complex problem,” Dr. Saket Priyadarshi, clinical director of the service claims.
In 2023, there were 1,172 drug related deaths registered in Scotland, an increase of 12 percent (121 deaths) compared with the previous year. Meanwhile about 30 people are sleeping on the streets of Glasgow every night, with thousands waiting for homes in often unsuitable temporary accommodation.
While nurses and other staff will work hard to ensure that everyone here can be housed, there is also recognition that occasions will arise when all the city’s emergency accommodation is full.
“The fact of the matter is, there’ll be people leaving here who will be rough sleeping that night,” admits Dr Priyadarshi. “We will be working very hard to get them into places. But undoubtedly there will be situations where that happens.” It’s a situation councillor Casey says he wants to “avoid at all costs” but he admits that housing pressures on the city are at critical levels.
Some are doubtful this is the approach that will make the difference. Annie Wells MSP, Scottish Conservative drugs spokesperson told The Ferret: “The SNP cannot continue to pin all their hopes on this new drug consumption room.”
She claims the government should be looking at a wider range of solutions, including backing the Conservative’s Right to Recovery bill, which would give drug users legal right to treatment including access to rehab. “While we cautiously welcome this pilot, we have serious reservations about how effective it will be,” she added.
Others claim that the service does not go far enough. Paul Sweeney, the Labour MSP for Glasgow who volunteered with activist Peter Krykant on an unsanctioned overdose prevention van in Glasgow, prior to being elected to the Scottish Parliament, says he has “witnessed first-hand its life-saving potential”.
The unsanctioned overdose prevention van supervised around 1,000 injections and saved eight lives that would have been otherwise lost to an overdose according to an independent evaluation.
Sweeney has since been involved in the long-running campaign to see an official site open. “The state has finally caught up,” he added. “But the official pilot on Hunter Street is by no means the panacea to Scotland’s drug crisis.
“To reach its full potential, the site must be expanded to 24-hour operation’. He claimed more “pastoral support” and recovery focussed services should be integrated into the service.
There has been criticism too of the costs, given the relatively small number of city centre users this is likely to serve. But Dr Priyadarshi says he no longer feels the need to justify the expense.
“I’m the clinical lead for a service for a group of people that I know have some of the highest mortality rates of any population in Scotland,” he says. “They die prematurely. They cause a huge amount of impact on the Scottish burden of disease . The effect that they have on their families, their communities, is massive.
“So I don’t see why we should not be spending money on reducing the mortality rates of even a small group of people with the levels of problems they have. If I was the clinical lead for an oncology service or a renal dialysis service or a neurosurgical unit, you wouldn’t be asking those questions.
“For me, it would be harder to justify why we’re not doing this than justifying why we’re doing this.”
Images by Angela Catlin
