[joeysteele]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

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 .

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.

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.