The war on drugs is over. It's right to try something different

Were you really expecting a different outcome? History is filled with examples to show that prohibition – in its many guises – doesn’t work and often has negative, unintended consequences.

Read more by Professor David Wilson

Lessons from Zimbardo’s “Stanford prison experiment”

How victimhood killed adult values

Chief amongst these is that criminalisation does nothing to tackle why people use drugs and the associated stigmatisation that comes with having a criminal record makes it more difficult for the drug user to find work, support a family or get help to overcome their addiction issues. Even as a prison governor I used to find the concept of “Drug-Free Wings” self-defeating, brimming with many and varied accidental outcomes. I wanted the whole prison to be drug-free and so recognising one wing or unit as such was actually an admission of failure.

And what about the men that we housed there? They might themselves be clean, but far too many were regularly selling drugs to other prisoners housed in different units within the prison. Those drugs could be smuggled inside through various mechanisms but, all too often, were brought in by a prison officer who – for one reason or another – had been coerced into behaving in this way because prohibition created a perverse but very lucrative market. Talking to friends who still work inside, I know that several serving prisoners are known to be making a very successful living selling drugs behind bars, and that some even sell beyond the prison’s walls.

The War on Drugs was declared first in the USA but, even there, just under half of all states have now, for example, legalised recreational marijuana use and 39 out of 50 states allow for medical marijuana to be prescribed. America has come a long way from just saying “No” and, of course, the prohibition era between 1920 and 1933, which outlawed the production, importation, transportation and sale of alcohol, still provides the best evidence we have that this type of public policy merely drives the market underground, rather than reduces the demand for the product that’s been prohibited.

Of course, the Philippine drug war, undertaken during the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, who served between 2016 and 2022 did see a reduction in drug usage, but that came at a significant cost. Duterte admitted to having an official “death squad” and thousands of people who were suspected of being drug dealers or addicts were extrajudicially killed – the government admitting to just over 6,000 such deaths, but human rights organisations have put that number much higher, with some calculating that as many as 30,000 Filipinos may have been murdered by the Philippine National Police. So the SDCF is to be welcomed as a recognition that other policies have failed, but what is it that we want it to do and how should we measure its success?

Let’s think about answering that last question in two different ways – success for the community of Glasgow and secondly success for those who inject drugs. This latter issue is no small matter for we know that 1,172 people died in Scotland in 2024 from drug-related issues – a 12 per cent increase from the numbers who’d died in 2023. Those numbers are a stark reminder that problematic drug use – which usually involves injecting – remains a significant public health challenge in Scotland. At The Thistle users have access to clean equipment, advice about safer injecting techniques and to staff who’ve expertise in responding to overdoses and who’ll also be able to provide advice about other health care issues. The end goal here is surely to see a reduction in the numbers of people who are problematic drug users ending up dead. The SDCF is not about ending drug use but more to do with promoting harm reduction and preventing fatal overdoses.

In 2024, 1,172 people died in Scotland from drug-related issues (Image: Getty)

In turn, all of this should benefit everyone else – from those who’ll no longer encounter discarded needles in our city centres to reducing the numbers of acute hospital admissions in our NHS and lessening the time spent by our Police and court system in handing issues which arise from injecting in public spaces.

I’m really not seeing this issue through rose-tinted spectacles. I accept that there’ll be problems and issues which are going to arise and that there remain legitimate concerns that the existence of The Thistle might be seen to encourage, rather than reduce problematic drug use. Nor am I pretending that using drugs is a social good – it isn’t. However, we have to deal with all of this from the place where we currently stand and so, for me, it’s brave to admit that we’ve got to try something different.

I’ve seen that sort of bravery before, with the ground-breaking Glasgow Violence Reduction Strategy – which was later expanded and extended to the whole of Scotland. That too was an admission that trying to fix a problem by using the Police and the wider criminal justice system had failed and that a different approach had to be implemented if violence – including murder – was going to be reduced.

You’ll know the figures yourself. Glasgow, the “Murder Capital of Europe” in 2006, reduced the numbers of murders in the city by 60 per cent within a decade by dealing with the problem not as we’d always done, but by trying something else.

The Thistle is our latest “something else”. Let’s give it a chance.

Professor David Wilson is a Scottish emeritus professor of criminology, Herald columnist and TV presenter. A former prison governor, he is well known as a criminologist specialising in serial killers