UK Parliament Home Affairs Committee on Drugs: Written Evidence submitted by Dr. Carlton Brick (DRU0040)

This submission adopts a critical approach to current Scottish Government policy on drugs and drug deaths specifically. It pinpoints the increasing tendency of harm reduction strategies to undermine approaches to drug recovery that advocate abstinence as a realistic goal. The submission suggests that harm reduction undermine the capacity of both medical treatment and the individual drug user to address and overcome the problem of addiction. Following McKeganey (2011: 169) - who argues that ‘Retaining moral judgements about drug use and accepting the stigma directed towards drug use if not drug users may be an important part of an effective approach aimed at tackling the use of illegal drugs in society’ – this submission suggests that Scotland's drug death crisis is underpinned by a wider moral abdication of responsibility by government, policy makers and the wider political community, towards both
the individual addict and wider society. As such this submission argues that the drugs issue is no longer simply a question of policy but has become a fundamental moral question that pertains to how the UK and devolved administrations understand addiction in relation to the interests,
common norms and values of civil society and the wider national community.