The 100-Year Life Health Education and Government
The UK’s first legal drug consumption room opened in Glasgow yesterday, offering addicts a clean place to take drugs under medical supervision.
The Thistle Centre took ten years to get approved but Dr Saket Priyadarshi, who was part of a think tank that first proposed the centre in 2008, hopes it will offer protection from the “shame and discrimination” felt by users, some of whom inject cocaine more than a dozen times a day.
Glasgow council agreed to the project after the city saw the UK’s largest HIV outbreak for 30 years among homeless people and intravenous drug users in 2016.
Two years ago, Scotland’s Lord Advocate agreed to not prosecute drug possession in the centre. Scotland’s rate of drug deaths is the highest in Europe.
In 2023, it recorded more than three deaths a day – up 12 per cent on 2022.
Zurich, which launched a similar project of safe rooms dispensing heroin in 1994, has cut opioid deaths by 64 per cent over 20 years.
