Desperate to recover from his 40-year drug addiction and start a new life, Tony Devine applied for a passport in a bid to fulfil his dream of visiting family overseas.
The much-loved uncle had just been discharged from Gartnavel Royal and was determined to turn his life around once and for all.
But the battle was too much and, on June 23 last year, the 63-year-old was found dead in his Castlehill home following an accidental overdose.
He had taken a lethal cocktail of drugs, with ‘street valium’, painkillers, cannabis and cocaine found in his system.
Tony is one of 28 people who died from substance misuse in West Dunbartonshire in 2021, with a total of 1330 lives being lost across Scotland last year alone – a tiny fall of one percent annually and the second highest total of all time.
His sister Liz Daly has opened up to the Lennox Herald on the family’s devastating loss as the latest drug deaths statistics were released.
She is demanding urgent action to tackle the crisis.
Liz, 66, said: “The numbers are released every year and you think ‘that’s awful’ but you don’t always realise there is a life behind each number and these are people who meant something to somebody else.
“This year, one of those numbers is my brother.
“Tony was 63 when he died. You don’t think men in that age group will die due to drugs but he had been addicted to drugs from his early 20s. He didn’t choose that life.
“He wasn’t a recreational drug user. He used drugs to kill his pain but it was too deep.”
The Scottish Government responded to the drugs crisis by declaring a health “emergency”, announcing extra cash and setting up a Drug Deaths Taskforce.
But the latest figures show it’s barely making a dent on the death toll with Scotland’s death rate remaining the worst in Europe.
Liz said: “A total of 1330 people died in Scotland last year which is more than 100 deaths a month.
“1500 souls were lost during the sinking of the Titanic and we are losing almost that number of people every year to drugs.
“Every year, the equivalent of the Titanic is going down in Scotland and we are allowing that ship to sink.
“It needs to stop. There has to be a huge focus on support and recovery.
“There needs to be a proper recovery programme that focuses on peer group support, as well as a long-term programme because it’s not a short-term fix.
“There also needs to be something in place for when they come out of rehab, where they can continue to be supported.”
Liz told how Tony was desperate to recover but was unable to get the long-term support he needed.
She believes his struggles began after a troubled childhood and the heartbreaking loss of their mother.
“People talk more now about adverse childhood experiences and Tony and I had both experienced that”, she said.
“In 1978, we tragically lost our mother and she was only young. I was married and had left the family home. But Tony was still at home and found her.
“He went off the rails from there and we could never get him back.
“He was a gentle giant. He was my little brother but he was always bigger than me. People expected him to be the one looking after me but it was the other way round.
“The main thing we did for Tony was to love him. He was very much loved by us, my children and grandchildren, and he was very much part of the family.
“We tried lots of different interventions. My husband gave him a job but his issues were too deep and he couldn’t keep at it.
“He struggled with relationships and found it hard to live a normal life.
“We’ve had to make some horrible decisions.
“He came to stay with us for a while when he was homeless but I had to put him out because I woke up one day to find him looking through our pockets searching for money to find drugs.
“Over the years it’s been like a rollercoaster. There have been times of despair and times where we thought things were going great and he’d turned it around.
“In the early days, there wasn’t much support about but later on he did get help from local agencies.
“He had a psychotic episode and went into Gartnavel Royal in 2017. After he came out, he said he was wanting to be a new person.
“He applied for a passport and he planned to visit relatives in America. We would have gone travelling together. Then Covid hit. His passport was never used.”
Tony became addicted to his drugs in his early 20s.
He successfully battled a heroin addiction but remained on methadone for 40 years, which Liz believes demonstrates the programme isn’t working.
Liz added: “It was supposed to be a substitute to reduce the body’s dependency – to be on it for 40 years is nonsense.
“He topped it up with what he could buy on the street and nobody really knows what’s in these tablets.
“In 2017, I found two of the tablets in the house.
“We sent them off to a university in Wales to see what was in them and it turned out that one was a Russian import and it was 10 times stronger than valium.
“The other one was of Japanese origin and was used to euthanise animals.
“It’s terrifying to think people are taking these and not knowing what’s in them.”
Liz believes the Covid pandemic and subsequent lockdowns played a huge part in Tony’s relapse. The siblings were very close and saw each other every day before it hit in March 2020.
Liz explained: “I lost my husband in 2018 and that gave Tony a purpose to look after me. He was coming down to my house every day.
“When the lockdown came and we couldn’t see each other that all stopped and there wasn’t much support for him.”
They still kept in regular contact but in June last year, on the day of Liz’s retirement from Braehead Early Learning and Childcare Centre, she received the shattering news.
A post-mortem revealed he had a number of drugs in his system, including street valium Etizolam which was present in 20 of the deaths reported in West Dunbartonshire.
She said: “The law has to come down on the people who are manufacturing these street drugs.”
Liz travelled to Edinburgh with daughter Joanne and granddaughter Layla last Thursday to take part in a protest outside the Scottish Parliament.
The Faces and Voices of Recovery (FAVOR) charity staged the demonstration as part of an ongoing campaign for better access to rehabilitation services for those exposed for addiction.
Liz is determined to campaign for action in her brother’s memory as an active member of FAVOR.
She said: “We need to value the lived experiences of the volunteers in these agencies who are seeing how it is first hand.”
She says initiatives such as the roll out of naloxone training, which reverses an opioid dose, are a positive step forward but do not reach the core of the issue, adding: “It’s not going to help people like Tony. The reality is that most won’t die on the street. They will die alone at home.
“The focus needs to be on long-term support, recovery and rehabilitation.
“I read about a man who has come out of rehab after three years and that is a more realistic time frame than a few weeks or a few months.
“A sticking plaster isn’t enough.”
Drugs Policy Minister Angela Constance said: “My heart goes out to all those, like Ms Daly, affected by the death of a loved one through drugs.
“Anyone who needs support for problematic drug use should have access to whatever type of treatment or recovery works best for them.
“For some people that will be medication-assisted treatment, but for others, it could be rehabilitation in the community or in residential placements.
“That is why we are investing £100million in residential rehabilitation over the course of this parliament to improve what is available.”
