LET’S BE HONEST about where we are. For the past year, anyone who has raised concerns about drug consumption rooms, residents, community groups, frontline voices, has been dismissed as exaggerating, spreading disinformation, or acting in bad faith.
That word, “disinformation”, has been doing heavy lifting.
Not to test claims, but to discredit the people making them. That’s because once a policy is framed as compassionate, questioning it becomes a kind of moral trespass. You are no longer debating outcomes. You are challenging virtue.
And that is a very useful place for a policy to sit. It means you don’t have to win the argument. You just have to delegitimise your critics. Now, Edinburgh is being asked to “consult”. But consult on what, exactly?
A policy whose moral framing is already fixed.
A policy whose critics have already been pre-labelled.
A policy whose outcomes, inconveniently, are no longer hypothetical, because this is not an idea anymore. It has been tested.
Across parts of Portugal, Canada and the United States, the jurisdictions that went furthest into harm-reduction-led approaches are now quietly stepping back. Sites are being defunded and closed. Policies are being rebalanced. The language is changing.
Not because compassion has failed, but because reality has intruded.
Overdose deaths did not fall in the way promised. Engagement with treatment remained low. And in many communities, disorder rose to a level that could not be explained away or managed through language.
That is not a fringe critique. That is policy retreat. And here, in Scotland, the early signals are already visible.
The sharpest rise is in Glasgow, the very city hosting the UK’s flagship consumption room. That does not prove causation, but it does destroy certainty. And certainty is exactly what this policy has been wrapped in. At that point, any serious system would stop and ask a very simple question.
“What if we are wrong?”
Instead, what we see is something else entirely. A tightening of the story. A system of organisations, funding streams and policy actors that are so closely aligned they no longer just deliver policy, they define the terms on which it can be questioned.
The same ecosystem designs the response, implements it, and explains why it is working. Or why, if it isn’t, it still must be. This is not conspiracy. It is structure; and it produces a very specific outcome.
A policy environment where failure becomes difficult to name, and dissent becomes easy to dismiss. Call it what you like. Most people would recognise it as a quangocracy. Not bad people. Not bad intentions. But a system that has become insulated from the consequences of its own decisions. And that is the real issue in Edinburgh.
Because the people who will live with this are not the ones designing it. They are the residents. The families.
The communities who are told, again and again, that what they are seeing is not quite real, not quite evidence, not quite enough to trouble the model.
Until it is.
Until it shows up in crime reports. In ambulance call-outs. In rising death figures. In headlines that can no longer be explained away. And by then, the policy is already in place.
That is the pattern. Dismiss first. Admit later. So let’s be clear. If this consultation is real, then it must be open to the possibility that the answer is no.
No, this is not the right intervention. No, this does not deliver what was promised. No, we need to change course.
Anything less is not consultation. It is validation.
And the question Edinburgh now has to answer is not whether this policy sounds compassionate. It is whether it leads to recovery. Because without clear pathways into treatment, recovery and reintegration, what you build is not a system that solves addiction. It is a system that manages it. Stabilises it. Normalises it. And quietly accepts that some lives will remain there indefinitely.
If addiction could be managed like that, it wouldn’t be addiction. Families understand this instinctively. They don’t want better-managed decline. They want their loved ones back. And until policy is built around that expectation, not just survival, not just stabilisation, but recovery, it will continue to fall short, no matter how well it is defended.
So yes, consult, but do it honestly. Without the moral framing that shuts down dissent before it begins. Without the selective reading of old international evidence. Without the quiet assumption that the answer is already known.Because if the outcome is already decided, if the critics are already discredited, and if the evidence is already curated…
This then is not a consultation. It is theatre, and people are starting to notice.
You can have your say here.
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