Scotland’s continued drugs crisis is the real tragedy that exposes the lie behind the 10-year anniversary of the  independence referendum.

The interests of the Scottish people  would be much better served by a  referendum on the entrenched drug crisis, rather than the endless reruns of the elite-serving ‘independence question’.

September 2024 marks the  10^th anniversary of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. Within an increasingly beatified and entitled nationalist sensibility 2014 has acquired  almost traumatic status. Despite voting  overwhelmingly in favour of staying in the United Kingdom, the anniversary has been used, predictably so, to blame Scotland’s current woes on others.

To mark the anniversary of the vote to stay in the UK, MSPs mustered the courage to back a thoroughly tokenistic pro-independence motion. The vote has no real substance other than it allowed a grandstanding first minister John Swinney to  declare that when independence is achieved and only then would the Scottish parliament be truly ‘…enabled to take its own decisions to fully meet the needs of the people of Scotland’.

This wasn’t  the only independence anniversary being celebrated. It’s also the 10^th anniversary of former first minister Alex Salmond’s prediction that he would see independence before he died. Following the success of the pro Union vote in 2014 Salmond definitely announced that independence would happen in his lifetime, and then duly stood down as first minister and leader of the SNP. To mark his own anniversary, Salmond, now leader of Alba, was happy to repeat the prophecy to anyone who cared to listen, adding the caveat that this would likely be within the next 10 years or so.

The former MSP may  have to moderate  his claim of seeing independence in the next ten years. I wish him no ill but, given current life expectancy in Scotland, Salmond may on balance be doing well to see out the next 6 years let alone the decade. In 2014 Salmond was 60 years old, he turns 70 this New Year’s Eve.

According to recent figures from the Nation Records of Scotland, current life expectancy for Scottish males is 76.5 years. For men living in parts of Glasgow it is a low as 72 years. The East Glasgow Health District has a male life expectancy of only 69 years, which is 2 years below that of Gaza. Since 2017 life expectancy for Scottish males has fallen by almost 11 weeks per annum (and just over 7 weeks per year for females). This fall has been consistent across most of Scotland’s council areas in the last few years.

Leading Scottish sociologist David McCrone  has noted that high moratlity  rates have become a defining characteristic of modern Scottishness. In 2012 a report commissioned by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health labelled Scotland ‘The Sick Man of Europe’.

Not only content with being  its  sick man, Scotland is Europe’s number one destination for drug deaths. 2024 marks the  6^th consecutive year that Scotland has topped the European league tables for drug deaths. Not an anniversary you’ll find Holyrood passing a motion on any time soon. Data for the year ending 2023 reveal that there were 1,197 suspected drug overdoses in Scotland – a 12% increase on the previous year’s figures. Consistent with the high mortality rates for Scotland more generally, it is men that are most likely to succumb, accounting for 73% of all drug deaths. In particular, men living in the Glasgow, Dundee, and Inverclyde council areas are most at risk.

It is worth noting that whilst average life expectancy has fallen steadily over the last two decades Scotland does appear to have become more adept at keeping its addict population alive a little longer. In 2024 a Scottish addict can now expect to live to the ripe old age of 54, as compared to just 32 in 2000. So, credit where credit is due. However, their deadly habit will still claim them in the end.

Premature death has been normalised as part of the modern Scottish way of life. Moreover it appears a way of life the political and policy elites seems content to encourage. 25 years of devolved administration, and a disastrous harm reduction policy, have seen  Scotland’s drug deaths crisis get worse not better.

Utterly meaningless ‘independence’ motions bely the fact that for nationalists and unionist alike,  the ‘independence question’  serve as a way to absolve Scotland’s political elites’ of their moral culpability for the unprecedented escalation of the drugs  crisis. Independence has become an ideological safe space. Whilst busying themselves arguing the toss over the pros and cons of a  Westminster free future, they continue to refuse any part in the  16 years of misrule they have nevertheless overseen. And they seem to be getting away with it. Public discussion of  its drugs policy, as with much of what else Holyrood has inflicted upon the Scottish people, very seldom rises above the level of  ‘what aboutery’.  Its time Scotland stopped passing the buck and started to take responsibility for what actually happens in Scotland. Otherwise, the direction of travel that has tragically shaped the last quarter of a century will only quicken – Holyrood will continue to fiddle, and thousands of Scots will continue to die before their time.

One possible way out of this tragedy would be a referendum on current drug policy in Scotland. The public engagement that a referendum would encourage  would go some way to helping establish a nationwide discussion that could potentially reshape policy on illicit drug use and addiction for the better, rooting it in the common values, shared expectations, and hopes  of ordinary people rather than the parochial prejudices of an increasingly remote and cynical elite.