This week there has been lots of media coverage of the opening of The Thistle - the UK's first official drug consumption room. Some of this - particularly this piece in The Spectator - has made me feel frustrated and disappointed with public policy and media debates.
I don't want to talk about the detail of the issue, but there are two key lines that reveal how disingenuous this kind of piece is.
The first is the headline: "Scotland's safe consumption room won't solve the drugs crisis". This is complete straw man stuff. No single intervention could 'solve' the crisis, and no-one has said it will, so stating this is completely irrelevant. It's like saying 'grass is green'. Yes, fine, but why is that relevant here? Just because something isn't an instant panacea, it doesn't mean we shouldn't give it a go.
Unfortunately that headline sets the oppositional tone for the whole debate. It's framed as a binary question of whether this particular intervention is the sole solution.
But perhaps I'm being harsh. After all, it's probably not the author who writes the headline, and whoever did is trying to generate emotions (as they did with me) to get clicks and reads.
But then within the first paragraph you get more disingenuous weasel words: "will it make any real difference to the national drugs death crisis?" This phrasing does the same thing as the headline: setting an impossible bar for the intervention to clear. One intervention in central Glasgow is somehow meant to address a national crisis. And presumably by 'real' difference we're talking a dramatic shift in the national numbers of drug-related deaths. Again, unlikely from this one intervention.
For all that I often hear that 'our' sector of alcohol, other drugs and 'addiction' is particularly emotive and politically charged, I think this pattern can be found in all sorts of policy debates. Setting up ideas as binaries and zero-sum games, where one intervention must be magic solution to a policy problem.
I suggest we need to challenge this kind of thinking wherever we find it, and emphasise that delivering positive 'outcomes' will invariably take hard work at a detailed level, employing a range of techniques and interventions.
The answer isn't to shrug our shoulders and suggest this kind of analysis isn't worth reading or listening to. And, although it can feel rewarding, the answer isn't to become a similar kind of cheerleader for the opposite position, and over-claim, for example, what a safer consumption site might deliver.
This isn't about being technocratic and lacking ambition. I think we can and should be more ambitious than this government has shown so far - but we also need to be clearer and more honest. This government is pinning too much on the promise of 'growth', which means it's arguably ducking some of the genuinely 'tough decisions'. Let's be open about those decisions and their implications, and try to genuinely win the debate - or at the very least make it a genuine debate worth winning.
These thoughts were originally posted on LinkedIn.
