Scottish drug deaths hit five-year low

The number of people who died from drug misuse in Scotland fell to a five-year low in 2022, although the death rate remained higher than the rest of the UK, according to new data.

Drug-related fatalities dropped by 21 per cent from last year to 1,051, representing the biggest annual fall since 2017, figures from the National Records of Scotland on Tuesday showed.

Scotland has suffered from persistently high drug death rates for decades, with the worst levels in the UK and Europe in recent years.

The Scottish government last month called on London to decriminalise the possession of all drugs for personal use, arguing that a “public health approach” designed to support and rehabilitate people would be more effective.

Drug enforcement policy is reserved to the UK government and the issue has threatened to be another source of tension between Edinburgh and London.

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Despite the improvement in last year’s figures, however, the rate of drug deaths in Scotland remained exceptionally high — and was 3.7 times the level in 2000.

Scotland also continues to be an outlier in the UK, with a drug fatality rate 2.7 times higher than the UK average in 2021, the last year for which data was available.

Opponents of the pro-independence Scottish National party have long pointed to drug deaths, and health inequalities more broadly, as an indictment of its ability to govern.

Scotland’s drugs and alcohol policy minister Elena Whitham said the number of drug-related deaths was still too high and said the UK government “could do more to work with us to help introduce harm reduction measures”.

“While I am pleased to see that hundreds of families have been spared this agony and lives have been saved, every life lost is a tragedy and the number of deaths is still too high,” Whitham said.

In 2021, the government of then-Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon invested £250mn into a five-year mission to address the drug death emergency. Whitham said the project would continue to focus on getting more people into treatment and widening access to rehabilitation.

The data released on Tuesday also showed persistent inequalities in Scotland’s drugs crisis, with people in the most deprived areas almost 16 times as likely to die from drug misuse compared with the wealthiest parts of the country.

Scottish Labour health spokesperson Jackie Baillie said the deaths were a “national tragedy”.

“The SNP need to provide more support for those struggling with drug dependency, invest in services in local communities and tackle the issue at its root,” she said.