Thousands of lives could be saved if safe rooms were set up in UK cities where people could be supervised while they get high, the world’s largest review of the effectiveness of drug-consumption rooms and overdose-prevention centres (OPCs) has found.
The part-government-funded study published on Thursday also found the facilities could slash the transmission of fatal diseases, as well as reduce drug litter, the pressure on ambulance callouts and the burden on hospitals.
Similar facilities already operate in France, the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Greece, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Mexico, Iceland and Colombia.
Each unit hosts from 20 to 400 users a day and is supposed to provide somewhere for people to take drugs in the presence of trained health workers who intervene if an overdose occurs.
They also mean people don’t have to rush their drug taking, 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 has yet been deployed officially in the UK, and the report warns the absence “costs lives”.
“OPCs can help save lives in an urgent and growing drug-death crisis in the UK,” said Dr Gillian Shorter, reader in psychology at Queen’s University Belfast, who worked with academics at the universities of Oxford, Kent, East Anglia, West London and Bristol on the study. “Alongside 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 facing our communities.”
But a Home Office spokesperson said: “We do not support the introduction of drug consumption rooms in England and Wales, due to significant concerns they risk encouraging drug use. We are working to tackle the supply of illicit drugs through relentless policing action and building a world-class system of treatment and recovery to turn people’s lives around, backed by £3bn funding over three years.”
UK drug users were 13 times more likely to die from an overdose in 2021 compared with 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 from supplies cut with synthetic opioids known as nitazines, which are up to 100 times more potent than heroin.
In 2020, an unsanctioned mobile unit started operating in Glasgow, and the city council and the NHS in Glasgow is due to open the UK’s first official pilot drug consumption centre on Hunter Street in Glasgow this summer.
The lord advocate for Scotland, Dorothy Bain KC, has said she is prepared to publish a prosecution policy “that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute drug users for simple possession offences” inside a pilot facility.
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In some cases, the facilities can also check the composition of drugs before use – an increasing danger amid the spread of nitazines, synthetic opioids currently penetrating the black market amid a decline in heroin caused by the Afghan Taliban cracking down on poppy farming.
“These nitazines are so extremely potent, the risk of accidental overdose has massively increased, so safe consumption rooms will enable help to be delivered immediately where it is needs and save lives,” said Dr Caroline Copeland, director of the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths.