Watching the News. Drug deaths spiralling

[Chosennone]

I feel this is becoming a huge issue. The government barely mention drugs anymore. Is it a lost cause? The problem is huge in my town and DC are well aware of 'druggies' skulking around/begging on the street, when i was younger it was 'tramps' or drunks. Ive just seen on fb that someone has seen someone sat on the maim street shooting up. Cannabis being smoked eveywhere. It has all been so normalised. It seems that the govt just blame the individual, many feel its just 'another druggy off the street'. It's all very sad.

I caught something about that but found the number of deaths depressing so wandered off

Actually the way I watched it earlier was that a lot of the hard core drug users are now dying say mid 40s because of the long term use. Kind of like it's expected to happen and then rates will fall again after more awareness was raised about it.

I watched it. Mostly Heroin and cocaine deaths from long term use. NE and NW had most deaths. The debate was about continuing to criminalise the activity or whether we should treat drug use as a health issue. We knew long term users would eventually die, and they are. There are now more of them. We haven’t had the right policies to prevent some of the deaths.

A lot of the article was about drug lines and missing children, especially from children’s homes. Some Police are prioritising this. Rightly so. However drug users still rob to fund their habits and are difficult to Police. They also cost huge amounts re social services and other social costs. We need a different approach and this was the thrust of the news item.

Horehound: it’s difficult to know if rates will fall. It depends on how many current users continue to use heavily. If health policies and safe rooms and free prescriptions were tried we might see a difference in death numbers.

I agreed with the points re decriminalisation. If we are getting towards epidemic levels, like it sounds in Glasgow, drugs need to come out of the hands of criminals and gangs.

I don't think that enough is currently being done to stop people from turning to drugs in the first place. What is the point in only helping people when the damage is already done?