They Already Know

Why I no longer believe Scotland’s drug deaths crisis is being treated as an emergency to end, but as a tragedy to administrate.

A new wave of MSPs has entered the Scottish Parliament and, in years gone by, I would already be drafting letters, arranging meetings, preparing briefings, beginning the long process once again of trying to persuade politicians to confront Scotland’s drug deaths crisis differently.

But if I am honest, the thought of doing that again now fills me with a kind of exhaustion I struggle to properly describe.

Not because the issue matters less to me. Quite the opposite. It is because after years of meetings, consultations, evidence sessions, campaigns, reports, media appearances, parliamentary debates and “national missions”, I can now see the process too clearly.

The meeting gets arranged.

Everyone is courteous.

Everyone says the right things.

Everyone expresses concern.

They acknowledge the scale of the crisis.

They praise the courage of people in recovery.

They speak warmly about compassion, urgency, dignity and evidence.

And then, almost invariably, the system absorbs the conversation without allowing itself to be changed by it.

The same quangos remain in place.

The same organisations continue receiving funding regardless of outcomes.

The same ideological assumptions remain largely unchallenged.

The same policies are repackaged under new language.

The same people rotate through the same conferences, consultations and strategy groups.

And the deaths continue to rise.

The Blind Leading the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

So perhaps this election marks a change in me as much as it does in Parliament.

Because I no longer have the emotional appetite to spend another parliamentary term moving from office to office performing the ritual of “engagement” for politicians who mistake listening for courage.

The newly elected MSPs are not inheriting another campaigner eager to sit in committee rooms for polite applause, sympathetic nods and carefully worded statements about concern.

If they want engagement now, then bring seriousness.

Bring courage.

Bring evidence that you are actually prepared to challenge the machinery itself rather than simply administrate its consequences more compassionately.

If they bring that, I will help them without hesitation.

Because despite everything, I still believe people can recover.

I still believe lives can be rebuilt.

I still believe Scotland can choose something better than the permanent management of despair.

But I am no longer willing to lend my time, my energy, or the testimony of grieving families and recovering people to another cycle of performative concern that leaves the underlying system untouched while the funerals continue.

The stakes are now too high for theatre.

So the question for this new Parliament is not whether it is aware of the crisis.

The question is whether it possesses the courage to finally confront the institutions, assumptions and vested interests that have helped sustain it.

Because Scotland does not need another five years of sympathetic language.

It needs leaders willing to risk comfort, consensus and reputation in order to save lives.

The Course of Empire: Desolation by Thomas Cole

What makes this emotionally difficult is that I no longer believe ignorance is the problem.

Scotland’s drug deaths crisis is not hidden.

The arguments for reform are not obscure.

The evidence around recovery, rehabilitation, mutual aid, recovery capital and long term reintegration is not sitting buried in some inaccessible archive waiting to be discovered.

After years of public debate, parliamentary scrutiny and sustained advocacy, it is impossible to seriously claim that policymakers are simply unaware.

They know.

Or at the very least, they know enough.

Which means the problem is now deeper than awareness.

It is structural.

Cultural.

Political.

There comes a point where repeatedly explaining the emergency to people who already know about the emergency begins to feel less like advocacy and more like ritual.

And perhaps that is the hardest thing to admit publicly.

That after years spent fighting for change, I am beginning to conclude that the system no longer exists to solve the crisis, but to permanently manage, narrate and administrate it.

And to be clear, that is not because I have lost faith in recovery itself.

I still believe people can recover.

I know they can because I witness it every day.

I am simply no longer convinced the system built around them believes it too.

For years, many of us have argued not against harm reduction, but against the dangerous imbalance that emerges when harm minimisation becomes the destination rather than the bridge.

We have repeatedly called for a system that does not simply keep people alive in addiction, but actively and unapologetically builds pathways into treatment, recovery, reintegration and long term change.

Instead, Scotland has increasingly built a system overwhelmingly orientated toward harm management while treating recovery itself almost as an ideological embarrassment, a secondary consideration, or a slogan wheeled out for speeches while policy moves steadily in the opposite direction.

Too often those arguments have not merely been disagreed with, but treated as morally suspect in themselves.

At points, the culture within parts of Scotland’s policy establishment has drifted so far that even suggesting an addict should aspire to become drug free has been portrayed as “stigmatising”.

The very language of abstinence, recovery and personal transformation has increasingly been reframed not as hope, but as a form of prejudice against those who continue to struggle.

As Dr Carlton Brick observed in his essay on Scotland’s failed war on addiction, harm reduction gradually ceased being part of a wider recovery journey and instead became detached from any meaningful expectation that people might actually overcome addiction altogether.

Policy slowly stopped treating recovery as the central objective and began normalising the long term managerial maintenance of addiction itself.

And when a society loses confidence in recovery as a realistic aspiration, it slowly begins adapting itself to the permanence of addiction instead.

Not because addicts lack worth, dignity or agency, but because the institutions surrounding them have become more comfortable managing dependency than risking the moral, political and clinical challenge of helping people fully escape it.

Because if outcomes were truly the measure, Scotland would not still be leading Europe in drug deaths after all these years, all these strategies, all these taskforces, all these consultations, and all these millions spent.

What exhausts you in the end is not opposition.

Opposition at least has honesty to it.

What exhausts you is the endless choreography of concern inside a political and institutional culture that has become more skilled at managing criticism than confronting failure

Abbey in the Oakwood by Caspar David Friedrich

.And perhaps that is the real danger of modern bureaucratic systems.

Not simply that they fail, but that they slowly absorb, neutralise and ritualise the very people trying to force them to face reality.

Because after enough years, enough meetings, enough strategies and enough funerals, a terrible thought begins to emerge:

What if the system is not failing despite the crisis?

What if, in many ways, the crisis has become part of what sustains it?

What if the endless management of tragedy now provides moral purpose, political theatre, institutional relevance, funding justification and professional identity to an entire ecosystem that no longer knows how to imagine its own existence without the permanence of the emergency itself?

And if that is true, then perhaps the most dangerous person in the room is no longer the one denying the crisis exists.

Perhaps it is the person still naïve enough to believe the system genuinely intends to end it.