The Right to Recovery Bill presented to Holyrood yesterday contains much that is laudable and urgently needed.
But one considerable impediment to the bill’s success could be the very prominent involvement of the Scottish Tories. Their Westminster masters still believe we can arrest our way out of our drugs nightmare.
They often bang the big abstinence drum so hard it drowns out progressive ideas.
They have been banging it for decades, long after it became clear that the 51-year-old Misuse of Drugs Act was doing more harm than good.
The Tories cannot be trusted to be acting in good faith when it comes to drugs policy.
Many believe that taking on this bill, given the hard work that had already been done by dedicated campaigners, was political opportunism.
It is however, accepted that the Tories are the messengers of something long in the making and devised by people who have lived experience of drugs.
The Daily Record has told the stories of families ripped apart by addiction and overdose, left to grieve for loved ones who died because they were snubbed, banished and ignored when they tried to get treatment that might have saved their lives.
But we believe the rights enshrined in this bill must be given serious consideration. Whether through the Right to Recovery Bill or a government-led spin-off, anyone battling drug addiction should feel confident that they have a solid right to treatment.
Tories bad for health
A walk across Glasgow is always an instructive experience.
Famously, as you traverse from the wealthier parts in the west to the poorer areas in the east, the number of years the residents can expect to live drops dramatically.
The life expectancy gap between people living in the least and most deprived areas of Glasgow was 15.4 years for males and 11.6 years for females.
Men living in Glasgow have the shortest life expectancy in the whole of Scotland, at just 73.1 years, down from 73.3 years in 2014.
A number of factors are at play in the statistics but one of the biggest has to be the effects of austerity policies imposed on the UK by the Tory Government over the last decade.
Rishi Sunak’s emergency funding announcement, timed to distract from Partygate, does nothing to alleviate the underlying poverty that is the main cause of early death in Glasgow.
Deliberately making people poorer kills them.
That, quite frankly, is the effect of over a decade of Tory power.
