Jackie Baillie
Published9th Sep 2025, 18:00 BST
In 2023, the Washington Post reported on the cases of a young bride, an American football player and a former soldier who all had one thing in common – they had died of an accidental overdose of nitazene.
A synthetic opioid, nitazene is 250 to 900 times stronger than morphine, making it stronger even than fentanyl, the other synthetic opioid that is leaving dead bodies in its wake. Created in a Swiss laboratory in the 1950s, nitazene was barely heard of until 2019, but in the years after the pandemic it has stalked America’s streets**.**
Unscrupulous dealers, faced with rising heroin prices, found it was a convenient way to adulterate their products. And now it is here in Scotland.
And while frontline workers have used naloxone, a life-saving medicine used to treat overdoses, to great effect, because nitazene is so powerful, it requires multiple doses.
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A man lies in the street in Portland, Oregon, after the authorities decriminalised all drugs (Picture: Patrick T Fallon)placeholder image
A man lies in the street in Portland, Oregon, after the authorities decriminalised all drugs (Picture: Patrick T Fallon) | AFP via Getty Images
Highest drug-deaths rate in Europe
One frontline worker involved with dealing with overdoses told me they had seen the numbers quadruple in the last year, and the time spent dealing with them is stretching support workers thin.
Sadly, the recent fall in drug misuse deaths in Scotland is likely to be the calm before the storm. And that is no consolation for the families of the 1,017 people who lost their lives in 2024, when Scotland still recorded the highest drug-deaths rate in Europe.
This is a damning indictment of the SNP government’s drugs policy. Dealers everywhere will sell dangerous substances to desperate people, so why is it that those in Scotland are suffering the most?
The fact is that even as Scots have been dying, the SNP’s funding for alcohol and drug partnerships amounts to a real-terms cut. The impact is felt in communities such as my own constituency, Dumbarton, where local projects are being slashed.
SNP’s wishful thinking
The SNP government likes to point to its pilot drug-consumption room in Glasgow to show that it is tackling the problem. But the whole point of such rooms should be to go out of business by directing users to the rehabilitation they need so they never come back.
While we know how many Scots have died from drugs, we don’t know how many have tried to get a bed in rehab but failed, as there are no concrete figures. The journey that leads to rehab is a struggle against the odds – it will not work if addicts have to wait weeks or months to get it.
And yet, rather than focusing on rehab, the SNP’s policy is to decriminalise drugs. This is wishful thinking rather than a serious tackling of the problem at hand.
In the years since the SNP government declared a drug-deaths emergency, more than 6,800 people have died. There were 607 suspected drug deaths during the first six months of 2025 – 3 per cent more than the same period of 2024.
We are already seeing the chilling effects of nitazenes – and it will only get worse. The SNP must act, and fast.
Jackie Baillie MSP is Scottish Labour’s spokesperson for health