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Published: 16 January 2024

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Blue America needs to send a stronger, more consistent message that hard drugs should be shunned.

The general message carried by the San Francisco billboard appeared as well in the New York City health department’s “Let’s Talk Fentanyl” campaign, which last year told subway riders, “Don’t be ashamed you are using, be empowered that you are using safely,” and further counseled them to “start with a small dose and go slowly.”

The nationally influential Drug Policy Alliance goes further: It lauds many fentanyl dealers as “harm reductionists” who should be respected and left alone by authorities (because the arrest of a trusted dealer might cause users to seek the drug from an unfamiliar source). A prominent subset of academics provides intellectual support for these initiatives, theorizing that stigma against drug use is ethically wrong and also worsens public health.

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Also see 

• I need to stop this - Help! 
• Stigma, Drug Use & Proactive Contagions to Reduce Both.
• “Harm Reduction” is Killing B.C.’s Addicts – There’s a Better Way
• Supply & Demand Reduction Must Go Hand in Hand – And Harm Reduction Should Not Undermine the Other Two Pillars of the NDS!

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Published: 19 December 2023

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Latest collaboration by Eminem & Benny Blanco on the many inevitable and tragic outcomes of substance use and the vicious cycle of addiction.

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Published: 12 December 2023

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What is one of the key drivers of addiction? Engagement with substances and permission to do so. Now we have some bad actors in the political space promoting greater and greater permission models to engage in and promote drug use - Thus, adding to the burden of this non-communicable disease by increasing suicide risk. In what #publichealth metric is this good practice? #addiction is just one Unnecessary Harm, and promoting drug use is culpable. #preventiondontpromote

(for complete article  WebMD Health Services)

Also see

• Cannabis & Suicide – Causal and Correlate?
• A Lifecourse Perspective on Self-Harm, Suicide and Alcohol Use Among Men
• Study of Cannabis Use Impact on Mental Health, Depression & Suicide:
• Alcohol and deaths of despair
• Does Substance Use Disorder Cause Suicidality? Or, does Suicidality Cause Substance Use Disorder?
• Marijuana Related Suicide of Young People in Colorado

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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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