EXCLUSIVE: Glasgow City Councillor Allan Casey said that there were a number of cities that had been looking into it, but was only at liberty to list three that had made clear steps to have such facilities of their own
Glasgow has opened the first drug consumption room in the UK in a pioneering harm reduction breakthrough, with three more cities in talks to follow suit. The opening of the Thistle, in the Scottish city’s East End is due to open on Monday, marking a new approach to managing and ultimately overcoming addiction in Britain’s urban areas.
Glasgow City Councillor Allan Casey has been one of the key figures in the development of new facility Thistle. He talked Daily Star through the new facility, and let on the other UK cities he had been speaking with regarding the development of similar services in them.
He said that there were a number of cities that had been looking into it, but was only at liberty to list three that had made clear steps to have such facilities of their own.
“Edinbugh is one of those locations,” Councillor Casey said. “There’s colleagues in London, the Greater London Authority that I’m speaking to, there’s colleague in Belfast that have publicly said that have said they are in support of opening up a safe drug consumption [space] and there are others who are really interested but haven’t made that public statement yet.”
The Scottish National Party member added: So I’m in process of formalising a network of cities working together to lobby the UK government to change the Misuse of Drugs Act (1971)”
Discussing how the programme first appeared in Glasgow, Councillor Casey explained: “Around 10 years ago, Glasgow had an outbreak of HIV in the city,” leading to an assessment being carried out the way it dealt with drugs and addiction.
The report said that a leading way to tackle “viruses was to open a safe consumption room, and so we’ve been on a 10year journey to get to this stage.”
That journey has been long, a riddled with red tape and legal pitfalls. “We’ve made appeals to both Scottish and UK governments, and just last year we managed to get Scotland’s lord advocate, who is effectively the chief prosecutor in the country and she indicated that she would be willing to give a statement of prosecution policy, which means it would not be in the public interest to prosecute anybody for the possession of drugs in the facility.”
The service is set to open 365 days a year from 9am to 9pm, and aims to tackle the 400 to 500 people identified by Glasgow City Council to be injecting and using drugs in and around the city centre.
The new facility will include chatrooms aimed at building dialog between officials and the people who are using through the lens of harm reduction. “We will also be providing safe, clean drug taking equipment, added Councillor Casey.”
There will also be an accompanying after carespace, which will focus on housing, social care and mental health support.
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