City gripped by overdose and needles: Will this fix the UK’s drug death capital?

You’re more likely to find an empty bottle of Buckfast than used needles in Glasgow, even down city centre alleys concealed from clear sight.

But they are there, lying beside the Bucky, hidden among rubbish in a disused car park, or piled on the pavement beneath a lamp post.

That’s particularly the case walking east toward Gallowgate, where the council removed 18 from one corner on Friday.

It’s not clear how long they’d been there – they looked fresh – but such drug-related litter is partly why Thistle, the UK’s first drug consumption room, sits 100 metres away on Hunter Street, tucked between the railway tracks Morrisons and a Pram Centre.

Inside the white walls of the single-story building, walk-ins can bring their own drugs and consume them under the watchful eye of medical staff, who provide them with clean needles, alcohol wipes, plasters and bins, and can save their lives if they overdose.

Although the government still insists there is no safe way to take drugs, the point of this facility is to reduce harm where possible. But can it also get people off drugs?

Opened last Monday, the idea was born of a HIV crisis in 2015, when at least 170 people contracted the incurable virus in four years. Many were homeless and caught it through needles shared while injecting cocaine.

At the time, recovering heroin addict Peter Krykant was an outreach worker testing rough sleepers on the city centre streets.

‘I was doing that every day, walking away from people knowing that they’d be back at risk within an hour’, Peter, 47, told Metro.

‘They were injecting cocaine 10 times a day. That risk wasn’t going away, so it’s just like, this job is pointless, doing this every day for no reason.’

Was there a way to stop the spread without abstinence?

Glasgow already distributed one million needles and syringes each year. But that didn’t stop the UK’s worst HIV outbreak in three decades, or a rapid rise in drug deaths.

If Scotland is the drug death capital of Europe – with a rate nearly three times that of the second highest – then Glasgow is the drug death capital of Scotland.

The city’s rate rose from 8.9 per 100,000 two decades ago, to 44.6 by 2023 when 303 people died – many of them at home, alone, from an overdose.

‘I’d go and sit in a café and this father’s lost two sons to drugs’, local jeweller Michael Milton, 42, said. ‘He’s drunk himself to death. Another one has lost themselves to drugs.

‘It’s an ongoing, common, common thing. It’s been a constant since the late 80s when heroin really took over Glasgow.’

Glasgow’s health workers and politicians settled on the idea of a drug consumption room in the hope it could cut HIV transmissions, limit overdoses, and reduce drug litter.

But it’s taken nearly a decade to come to fruition. Tired of waiting, Peter drove a van into the city centre and opened its doors to drug users in 2019. It was quickly in demand.

Peter, who was briefly charged by police for this, said: ‘We could see the same people three times in six hours, sometimes four times in six hours.’

Thistle’s service manager Lynn Macdonald is coy about their own numbers, but it’s in low double digits each day. While there, some chat to staff, clean clothes, have a shower, and enquire about other services.

‘One person not sharing injecting equipment and therefore contracting HIV, there’s a success’, she said.

‘One person re-engaging with family support, there’s a success. One person having an overdose and us being able to reverse it and not become fatal, there’s a success.’

The idea was welcomed by locals like housing worker Louise, 27, who said: ‘If festivals are good enough to have drug testing centres where revellers can go and know that they’re safe, why is it any different for people who maybe don’t take party substances?’

Michael, whose jewellery shop is a five-minute walk from Thistle, said: ‘[Drug users] don’t really bother us too much, they don’t come in out their faces thinking it’s a phone shop, but it pees me off seeing needles. I hope it works.’

But Thistle isn’t without its critics. Peter, who wants such rooms rolled-out nationwide, thinks it’s more clinical than comfortable, while Annemarie Ward thinks it is ‘an admission of failure from a workforce that does nae know how to help people recover’.

The founder of support group Faces and Voices of Recovery UK (Favor), Annemarie, 53, thinks Thistle represents a shift from recovery to harm reduction in ‘a system that gave up on itself’.

Although a 20-year-old women’s rehab closed last year after its budget was halved, the number of rehab beds has actually more than doubled to 124 since 2021.

But the £2.3million invested in Thistle could have funded six weeks at one of these for 200 people, Annemarie believes.

‘I genuinely think there are no hopeless cases’, Annemarie said, ‘but if you’re only providing harm reduction interventions and not doing the other end, of course it’s kind and compassionate, but it leaves them there.’

She added: ‘Hang about with smokers, you’ll smoke. If you surround yourself with people who are in recovery, you will eventually – it’s contagious.’

But not everyone is ready to recover. ‘There’s this young woman who I know, who was sent to a residential rehabilitation centre’, Peter said.

‘She was sent there twice – both times, she was sent back after three months to her council estate, she came back abstinent.’

Both times she relapsed. Peter said: ‘She was sent there for a third attempt. She went down there, she detoxed, she completed three months, then she came back, and then she died.’

Lynn said: ‘It’s really hard work. Rehab isn’t somebody going to a spa for six weeks. People need to be ready so they’re actually prepared for that, so we’re not setting them up to fail.’

That, she feels, is the importance of Thistle. In her mind, it’s not just a place to take drugs.

Many of the people attending have spent a lifetime on drugs, often multiple at once. They have underlying health conditions, like COPD.

‘They won’t go to the GP, they don’t always have a very good experience’, Lynn said. ‘They’re not made to feel welcome in A&E.’

But a positive interaction like they have at Thistle could lead them towards other services. Already ‘somebody has been asking about how to access enhanced drug treatment services’, Lynn said.

But ‘people can’t go into recovery if they’ve died’, Lynn said. ‘We have to prevent people dying.’

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