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The House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee has launched an inquiry into the UK’s first safe drug consumption facility, which opened in Glasgow on 13 January 2025.
In a press release issued on the same day, the committee said its inquiry would “focus specifically on the legal and policy challenges faced in setting up and running the facility, its current legal position and the challenges this presents, as well as the facility’s effectiveness in reducing drug-related deaths in Scotland”.
The committee is inviting written evidence submissions, with a deadline of 13 February 2025.
The committee’s chair, Patricia Ferguson, Labour MP for Glasgow West, said: “Scotland has the highest rate of drug deaths in Europe, and Glasgow is at the centre of this crisis. It’s vital that things change and that both governments work together to tackle problem drug use and stop people dying.
“In 2019, a predecessor Scottish Affairs Committee recommended that the UK government should support a pilot drug consumption room like this in Glasgow. Since then, policy and legal developments have made the facility a reality.
“This new inquiry is an important opportunity for us to look closely at how the facility reduces the harm caused by problem drug use, and what legal changes might be needed if the facility is to be made permanent,” Ferguson added.
The Glasgow drug consumption facility, known as ‘The Thistle’, opened on 13 January 2025.
It was approved in September 2023 by the Glasgow City Integration Joint Board.
Plans to open a facility had previously been blocked by the UK government, as an attempt by the Scottish Affairs Committee to allow for a pilot in Glasgow was rejected in 2020.
In a statement issued on 10 January 2025, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service — which is in charge of criminal prosecutions in Scotland — said that while the Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, “does not have the ability to make possession of drugs within the facility legal”, it was not in the public’s interest to prosecute people using the facility.
“I have concluded that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute people for simple possession offences when they are already in a place where help with their issues can be offered,” Bain said.
The number of drug-related deaths in Scotland has historically been the highest in Europe, and figures published by the National Records of Scotland in August 2024 showed that NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde recorded the highest rate of drug misuse deaths between 2019 and 2023 in Scotland, with 33.8 deaths per 100,000 people.
In August 2024, Neil Gray, Scottish cabinet minister for health and social care, said the Scottish government was “taking a wide range of actions through our £250m national mission on drugs, including opening a safer drug consumption facility pilot, working towards the opening of drug-checking facilities and widening access to life-saving naloxone”.
