The London Review of Books has the story:
The Thistle is the UK’s first Safer Drug Consumption Facility (SDCF). Ryan is a regular there. He wasn’t its first customer – three men raced one another to the door on 13 January – but he comes often enough to have claimed injecting booth eight in what looks like a chorus-line dressing room, with bright lights and tilted mirrors so the nurses can supervise users without intruding on their privacy. . . .
The most powerful argument for SDCFs is this ability to prevent fatal overdoses, something particularly important in Scotland, which has the highest rate of drug deaths per capita in Europe (1172 in 2023). In the UK, where drugs are a criminal justice issue and governed by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, such centres are controversial. It took ten years to get this one off the ground. But there are some two hundred SDCFs in other countries, including Canada, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and Australia. Different countries have different models: standalone facilities, hospital-based facilities, housing-based facilities and mobile facilities. Some are more medicalised than others. Studies suggest that as well as preventing deaths they also lower transmission rates of HIV, reduce ambulance callouts and A&E visits, and shift drug consumption off the streets. Deaths at SDCFs are very rare; I could only find evidence of one, in Ontario last October.
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