When Everyone Is Responsible, No One Is

Written in the weeks after National Records of Scotland reported 1,133 drug-related deaths for 2025, this article examines the public commentary that followed and argues that much of it misplaced responsibility. Responsibility for drugs in Scotland is split across three tiers. Westminster holds drug law, employment law and equality law. Holyrood holds treatment, health policy and funding. Health boards, Alcohol and Drug Partnerships and local authorities deliver services. Commentary tended to blame "Scotland" or "the system", or named only the tier the speaker opposed. The delivery tier, where outcomes vary most between areas, was rarely named at all.

Across eight sections, each read through a different theorist, the article restores evidence left out of the debate. This includes the longer trend in deaths, the caveats attached to international comparisons, and Scotland's published results on hepatitis C, opioid substitution treatment and residential rehabilitation. It shows that public health outcomes such as infection and survival were largely ignored in favour of individual recovery measures. It examines why the Right to Addiction Recovery (Scotland) Bill fell, pointing to limited bed capacity and cost, a diagnosis threshold, and the absence of employment protection under reserved equality law. It also considers the international evidence on prohibition, decriminalisation and supervised prescribing.

The article proposes a four-stage scaffold of Survival, Stabilisation, Reorientation and Reconstruction. Under this model, harm reduction, treatment, recovery and law reform become stages rather than rivals. It concludes that the missing measure is progression, meaning whether people move through those stages. Accountability requires naming each tier for the lever it actually holds.