What is it like living next door to Scotland's drugs consumption room?

The Herald Scotland

05-07-2025

Beneath the canopy of an evergreen set back from Tobago Street, there are some clues that the space has been used for the consumption of illicit drugs. The odd sterile water ampoule or rusted cooker is wedged in the soil alongside discarded cans and plastic bottle caps, but since the thick overgrowth was cut back at the beginning of June, leaving the area exposed, open-air injecting in the clearing has dwindled.
'The footprint for drug users to be able to inject but not be seen publicly has decreased massively,' says Frank Sheeran. 'Therefore, they are being condensed into much smaller areas.'
The chair of Molendinar Park Housing Association (MPHA) has been a resident in Calton, in Glasgow's East End, for 15 years. It's the reason he thinks there is a perception that illicit outdoor drug use has increased. The area where we are standing, sheltering under the tree's overhanging branches as fat raindrops begin to fall, was recently cleared by council workers in a swirl of controversy. But, as Sheeran points out on our Friday afternoon walk through Calton, many sites once notorious for drug taking are being brought back into proper use.
The number of areas where people are using outdoors has contracted. What might have been seven or eight different sites has been reduced to two or three. 'These people have been pushed from the periphery, and they're in a much smaller condensed area,' Sheeran says. 'Therefore, it's logical that when you look at those areas, you will see an increase in drug paraphernalia.'
New build flats on Barrack Street, Calton, Glasgow. (Image: Colin Mearns) New developments have transformed large swathes of derelict ground around Calton and the Gallowgate. The nearby site of the B-listed historic former meat market used to be a problem area. But the site is undergoing a £4.4 million regeneration as part of the broader Calton Village development. Sheeran sits on the board of the Meat Market Regeneration Community Interest Company and says that since work started on the site, drug users can no longer access it. Sheeran adds that he has not witnessed an increase in drug paraphernalia in the areas that MPHA operates.
The problem of public intravenous drug use is not a new one. Sheeran, who has for a long time been deeply embedded in the community, has close links to the nearby St Mary's church on Abercromby Street and spent a lot of time there over the years. It was a common occurrence to discover drug users, as many as four times a day, at the back of the church compound, where they were hidden from view. The historic issues are why Hunter Street was chosen for The Thistle.
All eyes have been on Calton since the UK's first Safer Drug Consumption Facility (SDCF) began in January as part of a three-year pilot project, allowing people to inject illegally-bought heroin or cocaine under medical supervision. It has since exploded as a wedge issue with some politicians and campaigners blaming the facility for increasing drug use in the area. Others have hit out at the rapid spread of 'misinformation' around the centre.
In February, a video that falsely claimed that The Thistle staff were supplying people with drugs and injecting them themselves, as well as blaming the facility for needles being found at the nearby Morrisons car park, was viewed more than 150,000 times online. It was condemned by Health Secretary Neil Gray, who branded the falsehoods as 'shameful' when asked by Labour MSP Paul Sweeney what could be done to tackle incorrect information about the facility.
Cllr Allan Casey defends The Thistle (Image: Colin Mearns) Councillor Allan Casey, in his role as the City Convenor for Workforce, Homelessness and Addiction Services at Glasgow City Council, has played a crucial role in delivering the facility and defends it despite the backlash.
Last month, a freedom of information (FOI) request by the Scottish Tories revealed that council officials had received 175 complaints relating to drug paraphernalia within a one-mile radius of the facility between January and May 2025. In comparison, there were 187 reports of needles or drug paraphernalia in the previous five months, between August and December 2024. A one-mile radius from The Thistle takes in most of the city centre, where drug use is prevalent, as well as Bridgeton, Dalmarnock, Royston, Gorbals and Dennistoun. A total of 175 reports is similar to the period before, but a reduction overall, according to data obtained by our sister title, the Glasgow Times. The month before The Thistle opened, complaints had dropped to their lowest in two years.
Annie Wells, drugs spokeswoman for the Tories, argued the 175 complaints were reason enough for the Scottish Government to back the party's Right to Recovery Bill, which looks to enshrine the right to treatment for alcohol and drug addiction.
'Annie Wells' remarks are not only detached from reality but dangerously misleading,' Councillor Casey told The Herald at the time. 'To suggest that crime and drug use are new problems in this community is a blatant denial of decades of challenges that this community has faced.'
A discarded injection equipment provision pack in Calton, Glasgow. (Image: Colin Mearns) Marissa MacWhirter talking to Calton resident Frank Sheeran, right, and Cllr Allan Casey, City Convener for Workforce and Homelessness and Addiction Services pictured at left (Image: Colin Mearns) Tobago Street, Calton where undergrowth has been hacked back (Image: Colin Mearns) Drug paraphernalia found at the Tobago Street site was blamed on The Thistle, nearly a mile away. The council clean-up came after a series of heated meetings at Saint Luke's, a music venue on Bain Street. Attended by outspoken campaigners like FAVOR UK's Annemarie Ward (who helped draft the Right to Recovery Bill) and Blameless's Colin McGowan, dozens of residents lodged a call-to-action over drug litter in Calton, demanding First Minister John Swinney 'admit there is a problem'.
McGowan brought a box containing 50 used needles to the meeting, which he claimed were collected in 'one minute' from the area where I stand with Casey and Sheeran now. The council's subsequent use of a digger to clear the Tobago Street land and strip back overgrowth caused an outpouring of concern from those who perceived its involvement to be a reflection of how much drug-related debris was present.
'The JCB was there to clear up historic fly tipping,' says Casey. His tone is tight with frustration as he leans against the tree trunk. 'People are deliberately distorting the facts on that and saying that we had to get a JCB to lift needles. That just isn't the case. It's not accurate.'
Part of the problem with popular open-air injection sites is that they are on private land. The council needs to coordinate with owners to arrange clean-ups, which it can only justify using the public purse for via public health legislation. Casey says they are trying to be more proactive.
'What we want to be able to do is try and squeeze that public injecting into The Thistle as much as possible,' says Casey.
A JCB clears the site (Image: Glasgow City Council) A Needle Drop Box (Image: Colin Mearns) Another area where the council has cut back overgrowth, cleared waste, and installed a disposal bin for hypodermic needles sits tucked away at the back of the Morrison's car park, near Hunter Street. We visited the site earlier in the day and found the contents of a drug package scattered around the pavement. Behind the bins, a fence has been installed to deter people from using drugs in the concealed thicket next to the adjacent unused train tracks. Signage for The Thistle is posted in known public injecting sites.
'It's not about trying to expose people,' says Casey about clearing back sites so they are visible from other public areas. 'But this is really dangerous, people injecting in these spaces. It's risky.' Last time he visited the area before the fence was up, he discovered two Naloxone kits, meaning someone might have overdosed there.
People have quizzed Casey on why public injecting is still happening here, even though The Thistle centre is open. But The Thistle is 'there to reduce harm, not remove it completely' – at the moment, it's only open from 9am to 9pm.
'Intravenous drug users have a 24-hour a day problem,' Sheeran adds.
Sheeran shops at the Calton Morrison's daily. It has become one of the main areas that people complain about. 'I see the same faces that have been here since Morrison's opened,' he says. Part of the reason is its proximity to the Lodging House Mission, a charity that does 'a great job' supporting homeless, vulnerable and socially excluded people. 'It naturally attracts vulnerable people because it's designed for vulnerable people.' Many of them, Sheeran says, are struggling with alcohol dependencies rather than drugs. 'A lot of people don't understand the difference,' says Sheeran.
Frank Sheeran (Image: Colin Mearns) Some areas of Calton are being redeveloped (Image: Colin Mearns) 'I'm not just one of these guys that doesn't stay in the community and has a view on it,' Sheeran says. 'I do know what I'm talking about. I understand and I can empathise with these people. I can see what's happening on a day-to-day basis. That's why I have been active in the community. We need local people to be involved in the decision-making.'
I ask Sheeran what kind of impact The Thistle and outdoor injecting have on his day-to-day life. 'It doesn't negatively impact me at all,' Sheeran replies. Each evening when he walks his dogs, Sheeran keeps his eye out for any injection material, but he maintains there has been 'absolutely no significant increase' in drug paraphernalia in the areas that he walks. 'But I'm not going to out-of-the-way places.'
'I've been supportive of The Thistle, it's not something I'm against,' Councillor Thomas Kerr tells me over the phone. 'Anything to try and tackle the drug deaths crisis, I've been supportive of.'
The Shettleston representative, who defected from the Tories to Reform UK in January, has been vocal about representing the views of residents and business owners in and around Calton who feel there is an increase in drug litter since The Thistle opened. At the residents' meeting in Saint Luke's, he felt 'a real anger', and he doesn't think Calton is the right place for the SDFC. '[Residents] don't feel as if they have been consulted properly. They're angry at politicians, particularly in the City Chambers, who gaslight them.'
Could the perception that there is an increase in drug paraphernalia be related to development, and the shrinking area of hidden derelict space for injecting? 'I understand that point entirely,' Kerr says. But he added, residents 'do feel as if there is some sort of increase round about because of The Thistle.'
The issue hits close to home for Kerr. 'I had two parents who were drug addicts,' he says. 'You do not use drugs in a regulated way.' Kerr's dad, who was based in the East End, passed away in 2016. 'I don't think The Thistle would have saved his life.'
'Unless the council and the government are serious about opening [drug consumption] facilities in every single community, which they're not going to do because they don't have funding and communities wouldn't want it – then you need to be able to fund addiction properly,' he says.
Reform UK councillor Thomas Kerr's parents were addictsKerr doesn't disagree with drug consumption facilities, he says, but maintains they are about 'managing an addiction rather than solving your addiction.' He has more faith in the impacts of abstinence-based rehab facilities. 'Which my mum has been through, and she's still here.'
Health officials were required to consult the community before the Lord Advocate signed off on The Thistle's opening. Numerous drop-in meetings were held over the course of a year between the centre's staff and residents. In April, the Scottish Drugs Forum called on residents to get involved in the evaluation of the new service, and residents were invited by the centre, through the Calton Community Council, to visit the service and have any questions answered.
'It's become clear that there is a very strong local lobbying group against the centre, which is a real shame, because there was intention to engage and work with the community,' says Catriona Matheson, Professor in Substance Use at the University of Stirling and chair of the Ministerial Drug Death Task Force in Scotland from July 2019 to December 2021. It was always going to be controversial, but politicians amplifying local concerns 'can be quite harmful'.
A false dichotomy has emerged, she says, where it seems like the only options are either abstinence-based, residential rehabilitation or harm reduction services (like The Thistle). So far, no one who has used The Thistle has requested residential rehab.
A path to recovery could look like moving from chaotic street injecting to a stabilising treatment, like an opiate replacement therapy, before thinking about moving towards abstinence and residential treatments once in a better place. 'But, going straight from the harm reduction injecting facility to residential rehab would be quite a leap,' she says.
'What will be interesting is whether any of the people using the facility have previously been in residential treatment, and happened to them?' Professor Matheson muses.
A poster directing people to The Thistle in Calton (Image: Colin Mearns)
The Thistle is a very important, 'symbolic' step forward, but there is a risk that people are seeing it as more than it is. 'It's not a silver bullet,' says Jan Mayor, Practice and Innovation Lead for Alcohol and Other Drugs at Turning Point Scotland (TPS). 'I think a lot of hope is being invested in it, or people are setting it up to do a lot more than it's capable of doing.'
The idea that harm reduction and abstinence-based residential rehabilitation are in competition is a 'myth in the public, or in the media, or sometimes politically wound up.' 'We need the whole range,' says Major. 'There are very, very few people who get to abstinence-based recovery, and it's not the only type of recovery; there are many ways to recover.'
'What the people who provide abstinence-based recovery services would say is they don't want people to be sent through to them who aren't ready for that stage of the journey,' she adds. 'You don't jump from the bottom of a ladder to the top of the mountain.'
Drug use patterns have changed over the years, something that is important to acknowledge when talking about the facts and figures around discarded needles, drug deaths, and other statistics associated with the drug crisis. People now inject cocaine, meaning they inject more times a day than with heroin (cocaine is the most used drug at The Thistle).
The illegal, unregulated drug market is also becoming even more toxic over time. The Taliban has reduced the poppy crop in Afghanistan by about 80 to 90 per cent, meaning there is a massive shortage of heroin, driving the surge in dangerous, synthetic opiates like Nitazines. And deprivation is getting worse. 'We know deprivation is a driver of the problems, and deprivation is getting worse because inequalities are getting worse,' says Major.
'We had street use beforehand,' Major says. She understands why people are frightened but is wary of those fears being twisted for 'political capital'. 'What they're doing is dividing us. These are not evil, bad people. These are traumatised people who are your neighbours. They live there. That's why they're using this site. These are the most damaged people in your neighbourhood. And if we can help them to get well, that's in everybody's interest.'
For many people who have used The Thistle, it was their first time accessing services. 'That will probably be the first time that anybody's ever shown a bit of compassion, shown them they mean something, shown them they matter, shown that they deserve the time and effort of staff and harm reduction workers,' says Casey. 'And that goes a long way in building trust with those individuals because they are the furthest away from services.'
They are often the farthest away from being ready for recovery. While staff have filled out plenty of referrals to support services and other forms of treatment, not a single person has requested abstinence-based residential rehab. 'What we want to do is work with those individuals, build trust with them, let them use the facility, and bring them on a journey towards whatever the path to recovery looks like for them.' Casey is firm about it still being early days for The Thistle, but the trust is slowly coming along. Sheeran agrees.
He is 100 per cent in support of The Thistle. 'It's a fantastic initiative.'
The drug users 'are being described as subhuman by a lot of people in the community,' Sheeran says. 'They refer to the people as junkies, scum of the Earth. They are people first and foremost, and as a social, caring society, we have a duty to look after the vulnerable people. Vulnerable people aren't just young or old, vulnerable people come in many shapes and forms, and we need to show that that level of care and understanding applies to everyone.'
Marissa MacWhirter is a columnist and feature writer at The Herald, and the editor of The Glasgow Wrap. The newsletter is curated between 5-7am each morning, bringing the best of local news to your inbox each morning without ads, clickbait, or hyperbole. Oh, and it's free. She can be found on X @marissaamayy1