Hansard

I will start where James Kelly concluded and acknowledge the contribution that Jenny Marra and Neil Findlay have made to the debate. I very much look forward to hearing their speeches in due course.

As James Kelly’s amendment reminds us, we entered this parliamentary session with a 22 per cent cut to drug and alcohol partnership budgets. Services and expertise that people relied on were surrendered.

The narrative and perspective at the outset of the session were damaging, too. There was a fatalism. It was often said that these were not well people; that deaths were the legacy of aging drug users, as though there was nothing that could be done; and that this was the so-called “Trainspotting” generation, proving hard to reach. The cruel reality is that many of those dying were not even born when “Trainspotting” came out.

Now, in the last days of the session, there is an opportunity to reflect and try to set the Parliament on a better course in the next session. The motion is candid, but there can be no other conclusion. The past five years has been a collective failure. The official records tell of 4,253 lives lost since 2016—the final toll is likely to be greater still. The pain that will be felt by families and friends will remain very raw, and I add my condolences to those expressed by colleagues. People are dying preventable deaths three, four, five and sometimes even six decades before their time. We owe it to all of them to drop any lingering excuses—there are none—and to do everything possible to turn the situation around. “Everything possible” will need to include some things that we are still told are impossible.

I think that Peter Krykant has helped to prove that—one man, going out, day after day, determined to save lives. He did not care about the consequences that he might face by doing that; he cared about the consequences for others if he did not.

If my amendment sounds familiar to members, it is because it is virtually word for word the one that Alex Cole-Hamilton lodged 14 months ago. On that day, it gathered the support of only the Liberal Democrats and Labour colleagues. I am returning to Parliament hopeful of a different outcome this time round.

We have asked the new Minister for Drugs Policy to look afresh at all our proposals, and I hope that she will see their merits. Indeed, in January, the First Minister announced that additional funding would be made immediately available to make heroin-assisted treatment services more widely accessible across the country. The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh is calling for such services to be made available in all major centres. There are people across Scotland who cannot afford to wait.

Turning to the second part of my amendment, I am asking for Parliament to agree to what I believe is an important principle: that people in possession of drugs for personal use should be diverted into treatment and that prison is not the place for vulnerable people whose crime is to be gripped by addiction. We could not secure agreement for that on 30 January 2020. From what we could tell, the Government was nervous about the precise wording, keen not to step on the Lord Advocate’s toes. Please forgive us for being slightly surprised when, only five days later, the Government was arguably doing just that in the Daily Record.

Scottish Liberal Democrats have been highlighting the pilots in Durham and Thames Valley for some time—schemes that have been badged as “de facto decriminalisation”. However, in the article, the minister was quoted as saying:

“I think the Lord Advocate will be influenced by the evidence”.

I welcome the work of the Daily Record. It has campaigned hard for changes to our drug policies, to target the dealers and get people into treatment. Putting aside disagreements over how it is done, Parliament could at least agree to that decriminalisation principle today.

The police are asking for change. Assistant Chief Constable Steve Johnson gave devastating evidence to the Scottish Affairs Committee in July 2019. He told MPs:

“It is just a matter of time: they come through the custody door, they get processed through the criminal justice process, they go in through the Sheriff Court, they go into prison. Of those people that come out of prison, 11% of them will die within the first month of having been released ... the police officers get used to this carousel, this sense of hopelessness and helplessness. The first duty of every police officer is to preserve life and when people do not come back through the doors with that alarming frequency, it is probably because the person is dead. It is not because there has been a successful intervention through the criminal justice process. That is a sense of foreboding within law enforcement.”

Members can understand why the assistant chief constable was urging “courage”.

During this debate, we are all looking at what can be salvaged from, frankly, five terrible years. It will always be for the incoming Government to progress its agenda, but such a statement in favour of decriminalisation from the outgoing Parliament would be difficult to ignore.

I move amendment S5M-24396.2, to insert at end

“; calls on the next Scottish administration to coordinate a plan for a Scotland-wide network of heroin-assisted treatment facilities, and agrees to work towards diverting people caught in possession of drugs for personal use into treatment and ceasing imprisonment in these cases, helping save lives.”