The debate around safe consumption rooms has taken a sharp turn in Canada in recent weeks, with provinces moving to close or defund services once seen as central to tackling drug deaths. That shift raises an uncomfortable question for Scotland, just as we debate our first facility, the Thistle Centre in Glasgow, and consider a second in our Capital city. Are we building a solution, or stepping into the final stage of a much bigger problem?
The arguments on both sides are familiar. Some see these services as essential, life-saving interventions. Others see them as ineffective, or even enabling. From my perspective, after nearly thirty years in policing, both sides are missing the point.
Safe consumption rooms are neither the solution nor the problem. They are something else entirely. They are a late-stage intervention in a system that has already failed.
For years I spent my time, and your money, playing whack a mole with drug dealers and organised crime, chasing people who prey on our children from as early an age as they can reach them. We disrupted supply chains, made arrests, secured convictions. And yet the market adapted, evolved, and continued. That is not a criticism of policing. It is a reflection of reality. We will never arrest our way out of this.
At the same time, we have built a system that largely waits until people are in crisis before it meaningfully engages with them. By the time someone presents at a consumption room, they are already dependent, already embedded in a drug culture, already buying from an illegal and unregulated market, and often already disconnected from the support networks that might have helped them earlier.
The service can keep them alive in that moment. That matters. But it cannot, on its own, change the journey that brought them there. To understand the scale of the problem, we need to look at the full cycle.
It begins with entry. Experimentation, trauma, self-medication, often linked to poor mental health or adverse life experiences. From there, individuals are forced into an illegal market. They have no idea what they are buying, no control over strength or contamination, and no protection from those who supply it. In that moment, they are not just users. They are drawn into a criminal economy.
The next stage is immersion. Dependency develops. Peer groups change. Survival behaviours take over. For some, particularly women, exploitation becomes part of daily life. Families fall away. Health deteriorates.
Then comes disconnection. People lose touch with services, housing becomes unstable, risk-taking increases, and they become harder to reach. Only then do we see enforcement. Arrest, criminalisation, the justice system, the loss of children, family breakdown, prison, and further trauma.
Finally, at the end of that process, we arrive at late-stage intervention. Harm reduction, crisis care, drug services. A focus on survival rather than recovery. This is where safe consumption rooms sit. Not at the beginning, not even in the middle, but at the very end.
And yet we ask them to do far more than they were ever designed to do.
We expect them to reduce deaths, reduce crime, support recovery, and somehow correct the failures of every earlier stage in the system.
That is not realistic.
The uncomfortable truth is that we have built a system that intervenes at the point of collapse, not at the point of risk. We understand this in other areas of public life. In healthcare, we know that earlier intervention and prevention can delay or reduce the need for acute services later on. And yet in drug policy, we continue to focus overwhelmingly on the consequences rather than the causes.
We also need to be honest about who is most at risk. Drug use exists across all parts of society. But the harms are not evenly distributed. They are concentrated among those dealing with trauma, loss, mental health issues, poverty, and exclusion. If we are serious about tackling addiction, that is where we should be focusing our efforts.