But here’s a new twist: You don’t have to actually use drugs to be killed by them.
This frightening fact emerged from recently released statistics revealing that 56 percent of all 570 homicides in a one-year period in England and Wales were related to drugs.
More than half. That’s a 33 percent increase since 2014.
“There is no safe way to take illegal drugs.”
This, in the United Kingdom, where they just opened their first “drug consumption room,” a $2.9-million-a-year facility called The Thistle in Glasgow, a sanctuary where hardcore junkies are invited to shoot up in a sanitary, arrest-free environment, only to return to the streets right after.
And supporters of The Thistle are claiming that the rest of the UK will soon follow suit.
“We have managed to do it in Glasgow,” said Allan Casey, the Glasgow council’s convener for addiction services, but “we need more [drug consumption rooms] in Scotland and across the UK as well, and we need to find a better way and an easier way to do that.”
Just how insane is it to encourage drug use in Scotland, where there were 33 victims murdered in a one-year period in drug-related homicides?
The Scottish government itself admitted, “The number of drug-related homicide cases is higher over the past eight years than in preceding years.”
So even if you make life temporarily more “comfortable” for addicts—even prevent a handful of overdoses with Narcan—how do you stop the murders that follow in the wake of that drug use?
Out of 3,062 murders committed between April 2019 and March 2024, 1,640 were linked to drugs. Nearly one in three suspects were drug dealers and almost half of the victims were involved in drug dealing or drug use.
As long as UK junkies want to get high, as long as they crave their heroin, crack cocaine and fentanyl, an undercover drug business will exist, complete with competition among drug peddlers which, all too often, spills over into death.
“Research demonstrates that the single most destructive element present in our current culture is drugs.”
Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was opposed to drug consumption rooms because he was “not in favor of encouraging people to take more drugs.” The UK Home Office likewise insisted that “there is no safe way to take illegal drugs.”
Does it not make more sense to invest in effective drug prevention and rehabilitation to stop people from using drugs altogether, thus ending the market for illegal substances and lowering the murder rate in the process?
If there still is a war on drugs, or any willpower to fight it, the UK is lagging far behind.
The UK certainly has a drug problem but, more importantly, they have a murder problem.
Sure, drug consumption rooms may lessen the deaths from overdose, but they do nothing to stop the killings. Either way, people end up dead.
Have no doubt—this war can be won. It only takes the determination, guts and grit to do it, along with effective prevention—prevention like the global education program the Truth About Drugs.
As L. Ron Hubbard put it: “The drug scene is planetwide and swimming in blood and human misery. Research demonstrates that the single most destructive element present in our current culture is drugs.”
Instead of encouraging drug use and coddling addicts and dealers, the UK needs to take a strong stand.
If they don’t, they’re not just enabling addiction—they’re sanctioning cold-blooded murder, as their own statistics now show.
