Drugs and the Union Addiction

Way back in 2014 – a date that seems to recede in time far beyond its nine short years – people were beginning to ask big questions. The question was becoming less about ‘Do we want to be independent?’ as ‘What kind of country do I want to live in?’ This bigger question opened minds and provoked people to consider something they had never thought of before. Asking yourself ‘what kind of society do I want to be part of?’ does at least two things. It first of all gives agency. It assumes that there is a ‘we’ who can act and have volition – and have the right to consider and implement changes to the way things work. You might assume that’s a natural and ordinary state of affairs, but in Scotland, and in Britain, it’s really not at all. The second thing asking this question does is it allows you to challenge things at a fundamental level. Most of the time things are just done because its the way they’ve always been done. These people are just rich just because. This guy owns this massive amount of land just because he always has. This group of people die prematurely just because they always have. The status quo was under threat – perhaps briefly – for a moment in 2014. But dependence won. The people who didn’t want to run their own country and elect their own government won the day, and everything that was predicted fell into place.

We did get Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. We were ejected from the EU despite our vote. ‘Federalism’ never appeared. We did have increasingly bizarre authoritarian and reactionary governments imposed upon us. Devolution itself was and is under relentless attack. Policies that directly undermine and threaten Scottish interests are developed. All of this was predicted in the result of a No victory.

Now, in an ‘exclusive’ interview with the Scotsman’s Westminster Correspondent, Alexander Brown, Alister Jack has accused the Scottish Government of bringing legislation purely to ‘manufacture grievances’ in a response to the call for the decriminalisation of all drugs for personal use. It’s a strange notion that a government would sit about just thinking up policies on the basis of what would annoy their political opponents but that is what Jack alleges. Mr Jack speaks of Scotland’s elected government like a recalcitrant child, and his manner oozes patrician condescension. He explains that the Westminster government had to impose Section 35 orders in order to keep the Scottish Government in check. Jack, who will stand down at the next election, was one of the few to stand by Boris Johnson as his entire cabinet resigned in a matter of hours. He refused to vote for the sanctions recommended by the Privileges Committee. Rejecting the idea that Johnson was the best recruiting sergeant for independence Jack instead heaped praise on him.

The Scotsman scribe asked Mr Jack why he had such praise for Johnson. Jack responded saying that Johnson had ‘got the big calls right’, a sort of vague homily that is often trotted out in defence of the former PM without having to resort to facts or evidence or examples of these ‘big calls’. But its Jack’s wider answer that is most revealing. He said: “If I take Boris and what he did for Scotland, I found everything he asked for, including structural funding and the spending powers in the UK Internal Market Act, and protecting Scottish business through the Internal Market Act – I got total support from Boris on that”.

I mean, of course you did.

The lens through which Jack sees the world is personal fealty. He was uber-loyal and got some crumbs off the table in return. The Internal Market Act is the principle means to undermine and destroy devolution so yeah, thanks for that. There is no notion that he could or should be speaking up for Scotland. None. Ever.

Jack will depart after the General Election leaving a trail of ill-will, and a putrefied set of relations all laced with barely concealed contempt. It’s amazing that Jack doesn’t face more public hostility, but then, what forum would that be in? When was the last time you saw Jack, or indeed any governing Conservative appear at an open public event in Scotland?

But back to the drugs.

Elena Witham, Scotland’s drugs and alcohol policy minister described the proposals to decriminalise as “ambitious and radical, grounded in evidence, that will help save lives”. Scotland has a chronically high drugs death rate and the plans are aimed at tackling that. Rishi Sunak immediately poured scorn on the proposals and a spokesman said he would retain his ‘tough stance on drugs’. Labour’s Rachel Reeves took no time to also denounce the plans. Witham has argued: “If you push people who are using drugs to the margins, that’s when bad things happen to people. If you actually allow people to have all of the information that they need, based firmly within a harm reduction model, people are going to come to less serious harm. We need a 21st Century framework to build around a public health approach.”

But Westminster and the 21st Century are barely compatible. The UK’s drugs policy is fifty years old. English media political culture would not allow such a policy innovation. The red-tops would go nuts. Such an expression of contemporary radical health policy must be suppressed. It might work.

In a way the drugs policy and independence are the same thing. Both are about treating adults like responsible grown-ups free to make their own minds-up and decide their own affairs. This is an intolerable idea to the British establishment. What we need to return to – and this issue offers a space for this debate is asking the question: ‘What kind of country do I want to live in?’ If your answer is ‘I want to live in a country where the important decisions about how we organise things are outsourced to a neighbouring country’ then sit back and enjoy the show. Decriminalization is a policy with results across the world. Scotland has chronic problems that cannot be resolved within the suffocating confines of Westminster’s embrace, whether it’s Jack’s patricianism or Labour’s dire managerialism – both result in the stultifying nihilism of British rule.

Comments (4)

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  1. Dan says:

    Worth at least a trial you would think given that the number of drug deaths is completely unacceptable & that the British state has a long history of trying out new schemes in Scotland, so I can’t see any reasonable argument against what you are saying here.

  2. Tom Ultuous says:

    From an article entitled ‘Experts Think This Is Why Scotland Has The Highest Drug-Related Death Rate In The EU’.
    [Experts believe the problem is not unique to Scotland, but rather that it is being seen in areas throughout the UK that have experienced deprivation since the Thatcher governments of the 1980s, and Scotland is the clearest example. A recent report from NHS Health Scotland and the University of Glasgow concluded that an “erosion of hope” in communities that experienced unemployment in the 1980s caused an uptake in substance abuse, with a delayed health impact.
    Dr Anna Ross, an expert in drug policy at the University of Edinburgh, told BuzzFeed News that a higher concentration of communities in Scotland were left hopeless in the 1980s and have been further punished by recent austerity.
    “The main cause is the result of ageing cohorts from Thatcher policies of the 1980s, which saw large swaths of small communities decimated with unemployment and no hope of finding other employment,” said Ross.
    “English figures take into account wealthy boroughs and not-so-wealthy boroughs, so it’s countered by some places with very low drug death figures. Scotland only has 5 million people and a much higher proportion in poverty due to deindustrialization – that’s what we’re seeing now.”
    One of the most notable points in the figures released by the NRS this week was that the over-35 age group accounted for 72% of the total number of drug deaths in 2016 in Scotland, and the median age of drug-related death was 41.
    Conversely, only 5% of the deaths were made up of those who were under 24.
    Experts believe that the growing death figures in older people show the deprivation of the 1980s and beyond has had delayed health consequences and has resulted in the deaths of older drug users over the past 10 years.]

    Westminster are quite happy with the status-quo. It gives them and the Direct Rule Diddies a stick with which to beat the Scottish govt with.

  3. SleepingDog says:

    British rule is not nihilistic but imperial (though being pro-nuclear war is about as nihilistic as it gets).

    There is an incoherence in this article between a life science approach to governance (which I respect) and a faith that adults will make similar choices if treated appropriately in this context. Problems with the latter approach ignore addiction, ignorance, despair, poverty, reasons for self-medication and self-harm, and pathways to substance abuse that begin in childhood (plus bigotry, hypocrisy, criminality and other cultural deficiencies). While I entirely agree that kowtowing to British imperialism is deeply wrong, we also should respect distributed authority beyond our borders, especially regarding our global polycrisis, and extending to our planet’s non-human life which has been so badly served by humanistic democracy and most other political forms.
    #biocracynow

  4. Bill says:

    Once again we see the hypocrisy and can’t of the right wing government at Westminster and their scummy acolytes in the fascist press.
    The Scottish Government is taken to task over deaths due to drugs. When they propose a way forward, based on evidence, again they are taken to task – only doing this to enhance the argument for independence.

    How long can this nonsense go on? We need independence and we need it now!! If the incoming government next year is Labour, will things get better? Highly unlikely. Will someone see sense before it all crashes down in a violent revolution?

    Let us hope that something ignites a spark, before the end of the world as we know it

    Bill

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