Scotland : Resign Sturgeon trending due to big Drug deaths
 

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Resi...&vertical=tren

It was badly mishandled at the beginning of Covid, they were deploying addictions nurses to wards leaving people stuck in lock-down with absolutely no support network, but the decisions were actually being made at NHS Trust level not by the government - the government actually stepped in and put a stop to that madness when they realised it was happening. Sadly too late for many whose substance abuse had worsened.

Of course it can't be put down entirely to Covid times but isolation/lock-downs have been an absolute disaster in terms of addictions. Worsening for people who were already addicts, and plenty of people who had no problematic substance use pre-covid sitting getting drunk every night on furlough and then finding themselves a year down the line with an alcohol dependancy.

I don't think we'll ever know the full "true" impact of Covid. Deliberate overdoses/suicides way up too.

Yes STV1HD
showing Conservative plans are better

Ch4HDnews
Showed a Shocking graph

10,000 deaths.


100,000 are addicted to hard drugs
but only 18 special beds available

Theres already a thread.

I need to be Merged to yours

34 to 50 age group so we are not talking kids, so what is going wrong

SNP.

In short, that is the age group who were worst affected when their parents were ****ed over by Thatcher.

It’s a slight over-simplification but it’s a huge part of the picture.

Late 80’s, Thatcher policies utterly decimated Scottish industrial/mining towns, the lurch into poverty saw many who were teens/kids at the time end up falling into a subculture of heroin abuse, and those people are now middle aged and dying (or descending into psychosis).

That’s why the problem is biggest in Glasgow (which was a heavily industrialised city) and smaller ex-mining towns.

Obviously addiction still happens in younger age groups but heroin, specifically, disproportionately affects that age range. And it’s the opiates that’ll kill you. Take a bit too much over the course of 24h and you’ll just go to sleep and stop breathing.

To claim that it’s the SNP is utter nonsense, these people were shooting up LONG before the rise of the SNP quite obviously.

I agree with all you say above.

It's a difficult issue to deal with too.

It's desperately sad and it's good to see the efforts being put into trying to get some hopeful change.

It's not going to happen overnight, of course the last almost year and a half hasn't been helpful to the sad problem either.

It's a decades old issue at least, as you said.
With still a long way to go as to dealing with it too.
Desperately sad

Well that's cute, but if these people have been shooting up long before the snp took charge, why have the numbers risen 7yrs in a row?

Scotland : Resign Sturgeon trending due to big Drug deaths
 

For one, because while an addict can obviously OD and die at any time, it’s not usually the “newbies” that you hear about dying. It’s the ones who have been shooting up for 15 - 20 years and have built up a huge tolerance to opiates and then pushed it too far. Need more and more to get the same high but like I said above, sometimes they tip it just over the edge of what the human body can actually process and they just fall asleep and die.

The other two huge problems, that are recent ones, are street benzos (valium) and fentanyl. Valium deaths are through the roof. A common reason is, most street valium barely has any valium in it because it’s been recut so much, so people end up taking literal handfuls of the stuff… then they end up getting a good batch, or getting their hand on medical grade valium, and they take 15 of them and end up in massive overdose.

So that’s part one - drug deaths are in the up because the people who started USING in the 90’s are now starting to hit 40-50 and their bodies can’t take it any more and they die :shrug:.

The other problem is that drug use is often inherited and endemic, it runs in families and it runs in communities, so it’s almost impossible to slow down… kids who come from families with substance abuse issues are far, far more likely to develop a substance abuse issue of their own… so if you can’t break that cycle the numbers are always going to increase.

Drug use and this drug deaths are lent just linked to poverty, they’re linked to pockets/communities of working class poverty. Thatcher created those pockets of poverty (entire towns) by suddenly and dramatically shifting most of the country’s wealth out of industry and into the city centres (neoliberal economics). The same happened in the US under Reagan, and the US has EXACTLY the same issues in EXACTLY the same communities. Detroit, for example, was an industrial city.

In terms of solutions I’m not going to pretend that the SNP couldn’t be doing better but the SNP have been in power less than 10 years and this issue goes back 35. It’s a wide scale societal problem that needs huge, radical solutions to address social inequality. Not something that can be patched up here and there by one government.

The only thing that is going to make any dramatic difference is a radical overhaul of both the benefits system and the school system, and while the structure of the school system is in Scottish govt., the funding levels are not, and education is woefully under funded (across the whole UK) and getting worse. Drug use will continue to increase.

A good read, thank you TS.

That was much cuter.

An excellent informative post TS.
Really highlights the issue and the problems as to beginning even to solving it.

One of the best posts I've ever seen on Tibb.

Late 80’s, Thatcher policies utterly decimated Scottish industrial/mining towns

Without "thatcher" where are these towns now?

It's hard to guess but the real problem with Thatcherism wasn't that there was change/transition - there's always change and transition, that's inevitable - it was that it wasn't gradual or healthy change... she whipped the rug out from under entire communities more or less overnight. They never recovered.

He is good ain't he:dance:

We should bring back most loved.

Sounds about right to me.

What an angry little man :think:. Birds of a feather I suppose eh Alf.

Ohhh wait this is the "white guys scored" guy, right? :joker: Gosh he really is trying isn't he, bless his socks!

Well, he seems to be trying at his job far more than Nikki Krankie is trying at hers.

It's a complex issue, I've talked above about how it isn't one that was caused by the SNP, the SNP have only had any real influence at all since 2007 and Scotland's issues with heroin go back much further than that. I mean the entire Scottish Parliament was only formed in 1999 and heroin was a problem through the 90's.

But I'm not going to pretend that they couldn't be handling it better :shrug:. Addicts are at the bottom of the pile when it comes to healthcare spending, in Scotland and everywhere else, that's the sad reality. General public more or less consider it a "self inflicted problem" and plenty of people moan that too much is spent on "junkies" already.