Contained in the UK’s first drug consumption room – podcast | Medicine coverage

The Thistle is a brand new medication consumption clinic within the east finish of Glasgow, which goals to scale back drug-related deaths within the metropolis. It will likely be open three hundred and sixty five days a yr.

In 2023, 1,172 Scots died from drug misuse – 1 / 4 of these in Glasgow, which has been named Europe’s medication demise capital.

Libby Brooks, the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent, speaks to workers on the Thistle concerning the companies they’re able to provide, and why they imagine the service is important in saving lives.

She says: “The inhabitants that the Thistle is coping with, they’re just like the exemplar of exhausting to achieve, proper? They’re individuals who have had, all through their lives, actually troublesome experiences with typical well being companies, with legal justice, and so the Thistle is attempting to attach with them in a really completely different manner.

“They’re now seeing folks who maybe haven’t been to a medical appointment, haven’t seen anybody official for 2, three years, and the Thistle is the primary time that they’ve really felt capable of make an strategy for assist, for therapy.”

Libby tells Michael Safi why a political stalemate between the Scottish authorities and Westminster meant it took a decade for Glasgow metropolis council to open the service, and the gradual shift in the direction of a hurt discount strategy within the UK.

Additionally, Councillor Allan Casey takes Libby across the neighbourhood to see public injection websites, and explains why they’re so harmful for drug customers.

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