Scotland's drug-death crisis is not a constitutional issue

The latest debate on Scotland’s constitutional future took place yesterday, falling somewhat awkwardly between the publication of figures showing record levels of children living in temporary accommodation and a study which found Scotland has the highest child mortality rate of any UK nation.

SNP ministers used to be fond of saying they would make “Scotland the best place in the world to grow up” but it’s a phrase seldom heard these days, another grand-sounding promise which has fallen by the wayside.

On the day after MSPs voted in favour of giving Scotland “a right to decide its own future”, figures from the National Records of Scotland (NRS) showed 1,133 Scots died a drug-related death in 2025 – an 11 per cent increase on the previous year.

Unsurprisingly, those living in the poorest communities are the most likely to die – some 15 times more likely than their wealthier counterparts, in fact. And while drug-related deaths have been increasing in other parts of the UK, the rate of death remains around 2.5 times higher in Scotland than in England.

Drugs minister Maree Todd attempted to make it a constitutional issue, calling on the UK Government to devolve further powers to address the problem.

In the Scottish Parliament, SNP backbencher Jack Middleton said UK law, namely the Misuse of Drugs Act, was “holding [Scotland] back” from the radical action needed to fix the problem. Todd agreed, saying there was a “very strong case” for Scotland having greater control over drug policy.

That Scotland has its own peculiar issues when it comes to drugs is beyond doubt. And while Scotland-specific interventions such as The Thistle drugs consumption room have gone ahead, the SNP’s critics point to its failure to properly fund drug and alcohol treatment services and the party’s unwillingness to back a ‘right to recovery’ bill when it came before MSPs last year.

While there’s now a growing body of evidence, namely from North America, that the most liberal harm reduction approaches are flawed, the Scottish Government has plenty of powers are its disposal to tackle this ongoing crisis as it sees fit. While drug policy remains reserved to Westminster, health is fully devolved and as the SNP has correctly identified, this is a public health issue.

On the day when it emerged that 116 more Scots died of drugs than in the previous 12 months, the SNP could have shown some humility, admitted that things aren’t working. Instead, the party shamefully attempted to blame Westminster for a crisis happening on its watch.

But the party which seeks to make Scotland an independent nation has never been particularly good at owning its mistakes or fessing up to its failures. The referendum result itself is regarded as some of kind of aberration where those who voted No will eventually see the error of their ways, despite the SNP consistently neglecting to make the case for leaving the UK since 2014.

When Pisa statistics published last week showed Scotland’s education system lagging far behind its English counterpart, education secretary Mairi McAllan struggled to admit there might be lessons to learn from across the border, instead telling a Holyrood education debate that she would look to Ireland and Canada as examples of international best practice.

John Swinney led his party into May’s election saying a Scottish Parliament majority would give him a mandate for a second referendum. Fair enough. But he fell short of that majority, seamlessly moving to a position where a majority of “independence-supporting” MSPs gave him moral authority.

But with every new damning set of statistics, any moral authority his government once had is slowly but surely draining away.