The Scottish government is challenging Westminster to decriminalise all drugs for personal use, in a fresh attempt to tackle Scotland’s chronically high drug death rates.
Introducing a new paper on reform, Scotland’s drugs and alcohol policy minister, Elena Whitham, described the proposals as “ambitious and radical, grounded in evidence, that will help save lives”.
But Downing Street immediately dismissed the Scottish government’s calls to overhaul or devolve the legislation, which is reserved to Westminster, with the prime minister’s official spokesperson saying that Rishi Sunak had no plans to alter his “tough stance” on drugs.
Less than an hour later, Labour likewise poured cold water on the proposals. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said during a visit to Hamilton, near Glasgow, that an incoming Labour government would not decriminalise drug supply or possession.
Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, who was accompanying Reeves, said Scotland had exactly the same drug misuse laws as the rest of the UK yet its drug death figures were three times higher.
“It’s [the Scottish government’s] cuts to alcohol and drug health partnerships, it’s their cuts to rehabilitation beds, it’s the failure to properly invest in mental health services,” he said.
Flanked by two former premiers, Helen Clark of New Zealand and Ruth Dreifuss of Switzerland, both now members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which is holding its annual meeting in Edinburgh, Whitham said decriminalisation was “no longer a novel approach” but in force “across the world and works well”.
Whitham added: “If you push people who are using drugs to the margins, that’s when bad things happen to people. If you actually allow people to have all of the information that they need, based firmly within a harm reduction model, people are going to come to less serious harm.”
Pointing out that Westminster’s drugs legislation is now 50 years old, she said: “We need a 21st-century framework to build around a public health approach.”
She said the new plan was “absolutely not a deflection” from the continuing work, funded by an investment of £250m across the life of the parliament, to ensure people can access “the treatment that works for them, from harm reduction to abstinence-based recovery”.
Scotland continues to have by far the highest drug death rate recorded by any country in Europe, and five times the rate in England. Campaigners denounced a “massive accountability gap” around quality and availability of services.
Whitham said the proposals were being shown to the Lord Advocate, who two years ago proposed what was then described as de facto decriminalisation, when she gave police discretion to issue a warning to individuals caught in possession of class A drugs rather than them facing prosecution.
She said she was not aware of any evaluation of that previous guidance, but diversion from prosecution was very different from decriminalisation.
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Asked what she would do if the UK government rejected the proposal, she said: “If the UK government fails to move forward with this policy paper with us and refuses to devolve the powers to us, then I need to take a position at that point to figure out what do we do next for Scotland in terms of drugs laws.”
Other proposals outlined in a new paper include immediate legislative changes to allow Scotland to fully implement harm reduction measures such as supervised drug consumption facilities, drug checking, and increased access to the lifesaving drug naloxone, which counters the effects of opioids in overdose scenarios.
Although the spirit of the proposals was welcomed by those working with addicts, the chief executive of the Scottish Drugs Forum, Kirsten Horsburgh, told the Guardian that the Scottish government “doesn’t have to wait for permission in a public health emergency to make change. I would like to see them being more bold to save lives.”
Horsburgh also said Scotland had already developed innovative responses to the current crisis using its own legal system, the police force, and health service. “Progress has already been made in terms of the extension of recorded warnings for drug possession, policing arrangements and the legal basis for injecting equipment provision services and its world-leading take-home naloxone programme,” she said.
She said Scotland could use existing powers to deliver supervised drug consumption rooms and drug-checking services “as a matter of urgency”.
