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Published: 21 November 2023

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(This is the same trajectory our National Drug Strategy has been re-tasked to comply with. Harm Reduction, an important pillar in our 3 Pillar strategy, has not only become the only priority, but has been used to rename the Harm Minimisation Platform to the point where Demand and Supply Reduction, are not only downplayed, but more and more ignored.

Sadly, pro-drug activists, who seek not to end addiction – thus decrease the cause of it, drug use – they instead seek only ways to normalise substance use and silence the overwhelmingly responsible non-drug using public through coercive speech codes that don’t even permit the identification of a problem. Ah, but that is a key to normalisation of behaviour, no matter how aberrant. You must compel people to accept it, and all the attending harms that accompany it. And this is the ‘new normal’? 

This callous soft-bigotry and worse, humanity diminishing endorsement, enabling, and empowering of self and public harm, is a reckless public health destroying strategy that generations will pay for, and not just fiscally.

Who is driving this narrative? Who is controlling the policy interpretation levers?

Dalgarno Institute Comments

Also see

• Ripple Effect – Chemsex, Violence, Road Toll, and the Growing Failure of Misused Drug Policy: Reducing or Increasing Harms?
• Re-tasking the Judicial Educator to Rehabilitate Not Incarcerate
• AOD Primary Prevention & Demand Reduction Priority Primer: TASKING THE NATIONAL HEALTH STRATEGIES FOR COMMUNITY WELL-BEING.
• Drug Use, Stigma & Proactive Contagions to Reduce Both)

Methadone accounts for almost 50 per cent of all Scotland’s drug related deaths; a figure which has almost tripled since 2015. This is more than double the rate of the United States. Methadone is prescribed by doctors wanting to wean addicts off heroin and this comprises a key part of the Scottish government’s harm reduction strategy.

In recent years, tensions have emerged between the governments of the UK and Scotland over how to view and deal with drugs. Unlike health, drug law is not a devolved issue. And whereas the UK government seemingly favours a criminal justice approach to dealing with drugs, the Scottish administration has opted for a public health centred approach. However, this apparent difference is not as clear cut as first presented. Both governments approach the problem largely through the purview of ‘harm reduction’. Yet in the case of Scotland, advocates steadfastly argue against the idea of abstinence and prohibition as appropriate approaches to drug treatment, with disastrous results.

Indeed, as recent academic research has identified, the rapid increase in opioid related deaths in Scotland is both ‘remarkable’ and ‘worrisome’. When comparing opioid related death rates across the UK as a whole, research suggests that there are ‘… no clear regional differences…’ and the role of demographics and deprivation as key drivers of the Scottish opioid crisis is limited (2). The key distinction between Scotland and the rest of the UK is policy.

The Scottish government has become enthralled to the idea of harm reduction as an end in itself, rather than as part of a more comprehensive strategy that places the problem of addiction at its centre. Policy has largely jettisoned any assumption that with opportunity and support, an addict might overcome their addiction. Indeed, in April 2021, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon suggested that public discussion on the ‘rehabilitation’ of addicts was largely a distraction and that too much time had been wasted debating the issue.

The SNP view is that the discrimination experienced by drug addicts, rather than their actual addiction, is responsible for the annual increase in drug deaths.

In reality, the Drug Deaths Taskforce campaign has little to do with helping drug addicts. It is a deliberate attempt to forcibly reengineer the common norms and values that shape wider Scottish society. Far from promoting tolerance and respect, the campaign sets out to stigmatise the belief held by many ordinary people that individuals are responsible for what they do, and if their actions are harmful to themselves or others, they have a responsibility to desist from such behaviour

As such, the Scottish government has set itself the task of re-educating local communities, and the Scottish population more broadly, in how their stigmatised options are discriminatory and perpetuate social inequality and, ultimately, drug deaths.

However, the view that underpins this outlook is highly cynical and dangerous. The focus upon harm reduction, at the expense of recovery and rehabilitation, and the targeting of so-called stigmatising views against addicts, endorses an idea that addiction is socially acceptable and, in fact, should be respected by wider society. It provides a technocratic managerial solution – albeit dressed up in the language of therapy – to what is in fact a fundamentally moral question about the individual’s responsibility to wider society and their ability to contribute purposefully to that society – in this case the addict’s willingness to exercise personal responsibility for their condition.

Conclusion: The Scottish government’s weaponization of addiction serves as the basis through which an increasingly technocratic and unaccountable political class delegitimises the moral and restitutive capacity of shared social norms. Legislative attempts to normalise addiction, through the undermining of liberal values such as individual responsibility and agency, seem to be readily accepted by politicians, policy makers and academic experts alike. Might this not be the real cause of Scotland’s drug crisis?

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Published: 16 November 2023

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Decriminalising Drug Use – The Social Experiment, Live, In Play and Multiplying Harm: The Vancouver, Canada reality – “Easily the most chaotic place I’ve ever been!” Seasoned AOD Worker.

Drug Dealing Paradise. Insite Injecting Room Insanity. Harm Reduction at its very worst. When you increase drug use you increase #harm!  No community deserves this. More importantly, no broken person deserves this reckless drug enabling, endorsing and empowering madness. Who is promoting this policy platform, what is their real agenda? It certainly isn’t safety, health and well-being.

Also See

• Permission: The Most Effective Drug Pusher Ever
• OPEN LETTER on Decriminalization of Drugs 2020
• AOD Primary Prevention & Demand Reduction Priority Primer: TASKING THE NATIONAL HEALTH STRATEGIES FOR COMMUNITY WELL-BEING.
• Legalizing Harm – Why Legalizing Cannabis is a Huge Public Health and Well-being Misstep

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Published: 17 October 2023

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The following two research papers that were released very recently, bring again to the public square the growing, and often lifelong harms, of child abuse. 

Whilst these research offerings did not specifically look at contributing factors, the Dalgarno Institute continues to prompt a deeper look below the surface of these appalling statistics. 

The ‘causal and correlate’ debate around alcohol and other drugs in the domestic violence space is often wielded by pro-drug and alcohol defending advocates to ‘inform’ us that at worst it is correlate, as if somehow that makes substance use – legal or illicit – less culpable. Whilst we concur one cannot draw conclusions from ‘silence’ in these data sets, we have enough data on record to know that Alcohol and Other Drugs (AOD) are more often involved than not in – if not cause – then frequency, intensity, and ferocity of abuses on children. 

To our thinking this is no coincidence; with the growing cultural dysfunction and the turning to substances in self-medicating various ‘vicissitudes of life’ and the often-simple hedonic engagement with ‘feel good’ chemicals to assuage boredom. 

Regardless of motivators, without serious culture interventions, including the prevention and not promotion of substance use via decriminalisation and other permission models, we are only going to see these heinous harms increase.  

AOD and Community Health Policies and practices cannot be siloed from each other, and a far more serious campaign of prevention and demand reduction is vital in this era of growing violence against children. 

The prevalence and impact of child maltreatment in Australia: findings from the Australian Child Maltreatment Study: The Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS) is a landmark study for Australia. The ACMS research team has generated the first, nationally representative data on the prevalence of each of the five types of child maltreatment in Australia, and the associated health impacts through life.

The ACMS has found that child maltreatment is widespread and Australians who experience it are substantially more likely to have:

• severe mental health problems
• severe health risk behaviours
• higher health service utilisation.

(Source: https://apo.org.au/node/322153)

Listen to her. Act now: the experiences and impact of child abuse on Australian girls: There remains a relative paucity of evidence on the range of abusive behaviours experienced by girls during childhood. Importantly, in the context of increasing awareness of the importance of learning from lived experience there is limited research in this field which draws directly upon the experiences of children and young people with lived and living experience of domestic and family, including child abuse. Released to coincide with the 2023 United Nations International Day of the Girl, this summary report seeks to contribute to that gap in current research.

(Source: Listen to her. Act now: the experiences and impact of child abuse on Australian girls (apo.org.au)

Also see

• The ‘Unleashing’ Of Domestic, Familial & Intimate Partner Violence – The Drug Factor.
• Role of Illicit Drug Use in Domestic Violence (Aust)
• The link between alcohol/drug addiction and domestic violence

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Published: 06 September 2023

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I'll speak generally here, because the lessons I've learned from my near 35 years of experience are mainly universal, and not necessarily from within the confines of my own family. Some have been observed through other close relationships in my personal life , which is to say, they aren't my stories to tell.

However, if I feel a lesson is beneficial to this community, I'll share it , just in a respectful way. The last thing I'm out to do is hurt anyone's feelings or speak out of turn. That being said, I have plenty of experience on the matter at hand, in many different facets and forms. While I may be nonspecific at times, understand it's out of empathy, not shame or fear.

Real substance abuse problems absolutely tear families apart over entire lifetimes if families allow it to go unaddressed for that long. And many do. Many do because they don't know what else to do, other than what they've always done. Be it drinking or a drug. If they’re the user or acting like they don't know what the user is doing or if they’re the loved one.

It not only tears apart entire close families, but it does so from the inside out, in the most merciless, unforgiving, and ugly of fashions imaginable. Addiction and alcoholism don't care about you or your family's feelings. They don't care what happens to your wife, husband, mother, father, brother, sister, or kids.

They [addicts] lie because they think it is the truth that will crush their loved ones, but again, just the opposite is true. While yes, lies or omitting certain truths may be easier in the moment or at first, they are never the real solution. I don't care who tells you otherwise or how they justify it, they can spin it any way that helps them sleep at night. Lies are never better.

I know from watching how lies and omitting truths destroy entire families, with the root almost always being a drink or a drug…

Brian Brewington  (webmd.com)