Thousands of lives could be saved if safe rooms were set up in UK cities where people could be supervised while getting high, the world’s biggest review into the effectiveness of drug consumption rooms and overdose prevention centers (OPCs) has found.
The part-government-funded study published on Thursday also found the facilities could reduce the transmission of deadly diseases, as well as reduce drug litter, the pressure on ambulance calls and the burden on hospitals.
Similar facilities already operate in France, the USA, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Greece, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Mexico, Iceland and Colombia.
Each unit houses 20 to 400 users per day and is supposed to provide somewhere for people to take drugs in the presence of trained health professionals who intervene if an overdose occurs.
It also means people don’t have to rush their drug use, can access clean needles and get help with other health issues, from testing for hepatitis B and HIV to accessing mental health support.
But none have yet been officially deployed in the UK, and the report warns the absence is “costing lives”.
“OPCs can help save lives in an urgent and growing drug-related death crisis in the UK,” said Dr Gillian Shorter, lecturer in psychology at Queen’s University Belfast, who, along with academics from the universities of Oxford, Kent, East Anglia , West London worked. and Bristol about the study. “Along with other essential public health strategies, such as naloxone availability and real-time drug testing, the adoption of OPCs in areas of need will help reduce the enormous costs our communities face.”
But a Home Office spokesman said: “We do not support the introduction of drug use rooms in England and Wales because of major concerns that they risk encouraging drug use. We are working to encourage the supply of illegal drugs pack through relentless policing and building a world-class system of treatment and recovery to turn people’s lives around, backed by £3 billion of funding over three years.”
UK drug users were 13 times more likely to die from an overdose in 2021 compared to the European average, according to a monitoring project. There were 4,602 UK drug overdose deaths in that year and since then there has been a wave of deaths among heroin users in Birmingham, Bristol and elsewhere cut off supplies with synthetic opioids known as nitazines, which are up to 100 times stronger than heroin.
In 2020, a disabled mobile unit began operating in Glasgow, and Glasgow City Council and the NHS will open the UK’s first official pilot drug use center on Hunter Street in Glasgow this summer.
The Lord Advocate for Scotland, Dorothy Bain KC, said she is willing to publish a prosecution policy “that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute drug users for simple possession offenses” within a pilot facility.
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In some cases, the facilities may also check the composition of drugs before use – a growing danger amid the proliferation of nitazines, synthetic opioids currently entering the black market amid a decline in heroin caused by the Afghan Taliban which strikes poppy farming.
“These nitazines are so extremely powerful, the risk of accidental overdose has greatly increased, so safe consumption rooms will enable immediate help to be delivered where it is needed and save lives,” said Dr Caroline Copeland, director of the National Program on Substance Abuse Deaths.
