Drug Deaths 2008
The following was written by Maxie in response to an article by Alan Cochrane in the Daily Telegraph. The original article can be found on the Telegraph website.
Alan Cochrane's commentary in The Telegraph, 13th August 2009, confirmed our worst fears in regard to Scotland's shameful statistics regarding drug-related deaths.
What has unfolded is an unforgivable tragedy of enormous proportions It could quite easily have been prevented but was allowed to escalate, largely unchecked, and to spiral out of control because of careless, self-serving, negligent, inept government and the "business'' that has been allowed to grow up on the backs of drug-addicted people. The drug companies are raking in a fortune, but that is just the start.
In the year 1992, I called for a Full Public Enquiry into the 75 drug deaths that year. I was granted a Fatal Accident Enquiry in 1993 covering 2 days— All Saints Day and All Souls day. This Enquiry did the Judicial System no credit at all and failed the weeping parents. The findings stated that the young people had ''died because they were drug addicts.''
Sixteen years later the carnage among our young and not so young people has continued to escalate unabated. The 75 drug deaths in 1993 became 574 by 2008. Where is the outcry? How has life in Scotland become so cheap?
In 1994 I did my level best to prevent institution of the government's Methadone Programme. I knew from information I had received that it was to be introduced into Scotland; but I was told, by those who were promoting it, that this was not going to happen and there was no need for me to campaign against it! Just 2 weeks later the Methadone Programme became "the treatment'' for addicted people in Scotland.
The Methadone Programme is not a treatment per se. It is just sedation by another addictive substance, one controlled however by the pharmaceutics industry and not drug lords. One of methadone's most worrying effects to mask the pain, nature's safeguard, caused by illnesses, which consequently lie untreated. A recent case known to me involved a lad, drug-free but on methadone, who was rushed to hospital with what turned out to be a perforated ulcer which was leaking. He was then turned away from hospital without treatment twice that particular evening, before being operated next morning on the THIRD ambulance emergency. Death was staring him in the face.
Maxie Richards 2009
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