James McMillan and Lisa McCuish have grown up as neighbors, In the tourist town of Oban, Western Scotland, in a street that directly overlooks the bay. Now they rest together, next to each other, in the small cemetery not far from their homes. James was 29 years old, in 2022, when he died of overdose, Only three months after Lisa, killed by the heroine at 42, after an existence spent fighting against addictions. Every year, Oban’s cemetery hosts new tombs, a symbol of a generation sacrificed to what is called the Scottish national scandal. For years the rate of drug deaths (the average in 2023 was 277 deaths per million inhabitants, more than double of England and Wales) is the highest in Europe, in second place Figas Estonia with 95 deaths, and based on the latest data it has increased again, after a short and temporary decrease. James and Lisa are only two cases of a phenomenon that has lasted for a decade and which in 2023 put an end to 1,172 lives. In 1996, when the National Statistics Office began to record, the victims verified were 244. The most recent surveys, published in 2024, reveal another increase of 12 percent.
Today, as on other occasions many of the families torn by this drama have made, James’ mother and Lisa’s sister ask the Scottish government a choral and more efficient assistance. “James as a child loved to go fishing, listen to music and go to skateboard, but he was a very angry young adult, with mental problems,” his mother Jane told the BBC, retracing the ordeal of a son who had left Oban to look for work in England and who instead had ended up entering and leaving prison, ending his existence on the street in Glasgow, after being released for the last time. «They released it in December in a city that he did not know, without telling the family, without a jacket to cover himself or money. He lasted less than 36 hours ».
The story of Lisa is different, a mirror of a more complex phenomenon That the Scottish government first underestimated and later managed to manage. She began to take heroin after taking a long time with anxiety drugs initially prescribed by the general practitioner and which then sought in increasing doses through the canals of the shop. His medical record highlighted consumption of substances based on benzodiazepine. Sister Tanya says he is convinced that Lisa’s story could have been very different if the support services for mental health had really worked. On the basis of current studies on the Scotland case, the factors that led to the phenomenon to be acted above all in the dramatic deindustrialization of the country, which created enormous pockets of poverty in some regions around the seventies and eighties, just when heroin began to establish itself on the European market. The arrival in more recent times of synthetic substances has done the rest.
The different aspects of the problem are also well highlighted by the consumers band of drugs that in Scotland ranges between 15 to 64 years of age, with a rate of deaths higher than 34 and 65, compared to that of teenagers. A “Trainspotting generation” – as is nicknamed by taking its name from the cult film based on the book of the Scottish writer Irvine Welsh -, which in reality embraces and includes more than one, characterized by the same dramatic final. After denied for years the urgency of more energetic measures (and cutting the funds to the only collaboration projects between the various local authorities), the Scottish government has finally decided for an effective approach starting from 2021, with the start of programs and rehabilitation structures, revealing a substantial change in the perception of the problem. Taken in the past as an exclusive question of public security also by the conservative government of London – who limited itself to referring to the sender the requests of the Scottish one to decriminalize the possession of drugs for personal use -, now begins to be considered as a drift linked to health and mental discomfort. “In politics to face drug addiction, we are on the right path” said the Scottish minister of health and social security Neil Gray, whose department inaugurated in Glasgow on January 13, the first center for the safe consumption of substances. Open from 9 to 21, all year round, The Thistle is dedicated to anyone who wants to use drugs in a safe environment, under medical supervision. In reality, there are many criticisms for an initiative that tries to put a patch on a much deeper social wound. The name of the structure that translated means “thistle”, a pungent flower symbol of Scotland, also symbolizes the path, all thorns and expenses, which the country has yet to make to come to the head of this emergency.
