Meeting of the Parliament 11 November 2025
I have already outlined the clinical and practitioner role in developing evidence. I assure the member that, in last year’s figures, one of the substantial areas of improvement was Greater Glasgow and Clyde, where we saw a reduction of, I think, 25 per cent. I may need to check that number and get back to the member to confirm it, but we saw a substantial reduction in the number of deaths there, and that was because of sustained effort. As I have said in the chamber many times, there is no single solution that will fix the problem. We need to take advantage of a multitude of opportunities that are ahead of us to try to rise to the challenge.
The member is absolutely correct to point to the difference in the drug use that we face nowadays. When the national mission was conceived, we were dealing mainly with heroin use and heroin overdose. The picture has changed substantially, and the threat from synthetics is significant and concerning. We have a number of courses of action to rise to that, not least the rapid action drug alerts and response—RADAR—system, which picks up and disseminates information on the new threats that we are facing. We also have some drug-checking facilities, and one has recently been approved in the west of Scotland.