Wells Said: The Scottish Greens Choose Heroin Over Hope
My disappointment has only grown since the day the SNP and the Scottish Greens voted against the Right to Recovery Bill, a measure that would have given every person in Scotland the legal right to treatment, detox, and rehab.
That day, I spoke in the chamber on behalf of Annemarie Ward of FAVOR UK, families who’ve buried loved ones, and communities who have lived this heartbreak for decades.
We believed that, for once, Parliament might put recovery before rhetoric.
Instead, it turned its back.
What has happened since makes that disappointment feel even deeper.
At their Autumn Conference, the Scottish Greens voted to support a policy calling for people to be prescribed heroin and crack cocaine on the NHS.
They call it a “regulated prescription,” part of a “progressive, health-based approach.”
I call it a moral collapse.
The Greens say “the war on drugs has failed.”
In my mind, it hasn’t even started.
Addiction isn’t managed by prescriptions alone. It is fought with hope, treatment, and opportunity, and that is what we should be offering every person in Scotland.
When did we stop caring about addicts?
When did we decide that abstinence, recovery, and hope were no longer options worth fighting for?
Because that is what this policy means: not recovery, but resignation.
Our NHS is already on its knees.
Every week we hear about patients treated in corridors, heart-attack victims waiting hours for care, and families facing months of delay for cancer treatment.
Even by the government’s own goals, it is not good enough: the target is 62 days from referral to first cancer treatment, and still thousands wait longer.
People seeking IVF or mental-health support face waits that stretch beyond belief.
Yet somehow, the priority for the Greens is to make sure that people addicted to heroin and crack can receive those drugs on prescription, paid for by hardworking taxpayers.
What message does that send to the families waiting, worrying, hoping for real care?
If you are diagnosed with cancer, we will try, maybe, to treat you in two months.
If you are addicted to heroin, no bother, here is your state-funded supply.
How did we reach a point where maintaining addiction is easier than treating illness?
I cannot help but think of the people I have met in recovery, the ones who have fought for every day of sobriety, who have rebuilt their lives from rock bottom.
Would they have ever had that chance if a prescription for heroin had been waiting for them instead of a place in detox?
Would we be telling them, “Don’t bother trying, we will just manage your addiction for you”?
This “health-based approach” masks a failure to act, offering sympathy instead of solutions.
The Right to Recovery Bill was about giving people the right to life, the right to treatment, the right to believe they could get better.
This new Green policy strips that hope away.
It replaces it with a system that says we no longer expect you to recover. We will just help you stay addicted, safely, sustainably, indefinitely.
That is not progress.
That is not compassion.
That is despair with a government logo stamped on it.
I have watched too many lives in Glasgow lost to addiction, too many families broken, too many communities stuck in the same hopeless cycle.
We cannot keep repeating the same mistakes and calling it care.
Scotland needs more rehab beds, not more prescriptions for the very substances that are destroying lives.
We need a government brave enough to believe that recovery is still possible.
Backbone and common sense seem to be in short supply among the MSPs who support this.
It takes courage to stand against your party when you know something is wrong.
It takes courage to believe in people’s capacity to change.
And right now, too many in that chamber have chosen comfort over courage.
To anyone reading, to families, to those still struggling, to those who have found recovery, I want you to know that there are still some of us in politics who have not given up on you.
Who believe your life is worth more than a prescription.
Who believe Scotland can do better.
Because the measure of compassion is not how comfortable we make addiction, it is how fiercely we fight for recovery.
I will continue to fight for fair and available recovery for every person who needs it, because hope is the only prescription that truly saves lives.
