As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
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Re: As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
#2Scotland is a tiny country but it never ceases to horrify me at the depth of the social and health divisions between different parts of the country, Scotland is often described as the "sick man of Europe" and Glasgow in particular has a remarkably bad life expectancy - the "Glasgow Effect":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_effect
I can strongly recommend Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari a personal account of a deprived childhood on the outskirts of Glasgow.
Edit: Something I find grimly fascinating is the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) and its interactive map visualisation:
Re: As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
#3Not mentioned in the article:
The Scottish heroin epidemic started in Edinburgh, the more prosperous of Scotland's two largest cities. This was largely due to the presence of MacFarlan Smith, which was at one point the world's largest producer of pharmaceutical opiates. That initial cohort of heroin users in the 1980s predominantly used drugs that were diverted from the legitimate pharmaceutical supply rather than smuggled from abroad, which led to an unusually rapid increase in the user population and the illicit market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacFarlan_Smith
The majority of overdose deaths in Scotland involved multiple drugs; for reasons that are not entirely clear, Scottish addicts are particularly prone to concurrently use opiates, benzodiazepines and alcohol in an indiscriminate manner. This vastly increases the risk of overdose due to the cumulative and unpredictable respiratory depression induced by multiple drugs.
http://www.sdf.org.uk/934-deaths-from-a-drug-overdose-in-sco...
Re: As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
#4My late brother used to talk about an area outside Glasgow called Springburn and how it is consistently listed as one of the poorest/deprived places in Europe (not sure if that was the correct term but it gets the point across).
Yet each election term they voted in either the same politicians or politicians with the same manifestos.
Nothing will change!
Re: As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
#5Scotland is a tiny country but it never ceases to horrify me at the depth of the social and health divisions between different parts of the country, Scotland is often described as the "sick man of Europe" and Glasgow in particular has a remarkably bad life expectancy - the "Glasgow Effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_effect I can strongly recommend Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari a personal account of a d…
While this is most pronounced in Glasgow, this is something that's seen at smaller but significant levels throughout the UK (outside of Scotland), so I don't think it's particular to that country. Wales, Northern Ireland, and the north of England (Liverpool and Manchester are specifically mentioned in the Glasgow effect Wikipedia article) have similar stories.
Re: As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
#6My late brother used to talk about an area outside Glasgow called Springburn and how it is consistently listed as one of the poorest/deprived places in Europe (not sure if that was the correct term but it gets the point across). Yet each election term they voted in either the same politicians or politicians with the same manifestos. Nothing will change!
I think we deserve it. 70,000 yearly people die from Big Pharma's opioid crisis in the US, Jeff Bezos and his companies barely pay taxes and his newspapers run non-stop spam about how we should disarm the peasants because 20-100 per year die in mass shootings, and people actually agree with it. Face it, we're opiated masses of worthless idiots.
Re: As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
#7My late brother used to talk about an area outside Glasgow called Springburn and how it is consistently listed as one of the poorest/deprived places in Europe (not sure if that was the correct term but it gets the point across). Yet each election term they voted in either the same politicians or politicians with the same manifestos. Nothing will change!
Well, it's more complex than that.
In a country that has for many years only had a broadly two-party system, there was little effect to be had by voting for someone else. And given Glasgow's historical politics, that was always going to be the lefty party.
Things have changed, though. The devolved Scottish Parliament has now been in operation for 20 years; in Westminster, Glasgow North-East (which is the parliamentary constituency covering Springburn) was in 2015 one of the constituencies that saw its vote swing massively behind the pro-Scottish-independence party that was traditionally unpopular in UK-wide elections, though they narrowly lost that seat in the unexpected 2017 election.
And this is the reason it is important – drugs policy is reserved to the UK government, and there's a fair bit of chat about it now.
Re: As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
#8My late brother used to talk about an area outside Glasgow called Springburn and how it is consistently listed as one of the poorest/deprived places in Europe (not sure if that was the correct term but it gets the point across). Yet each election term they voted in either the same politicians or politicians with the same manifestos. Nothing will change!
Paul Sweeney is one of the last remaining Labour MP's in Scotland, its very unlikely he will survive the next election. the MSP's are majority SNP now as has Glasgow Council recently been replaced by the SNP.
I see the drug problem in described first hand, I live in Glasgow city center and if our tenement flat door is opened at night in the morning I will be stepping over users and needles on the stairs.
However things are changing, the SNP are pushing for drug consumption rooms, currently being blocked by the UK GOV, but they are under increased pressure and will either buckle or independence will make it a non issue, as well as general city wide improvements, better policing + rehabilitation, reducing of shorter sentences etc.
Re: As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
#9Scotland is a tiny country but it never ceases to horrify me at the depth of the social and health divisions between different parts of the country, Scotland is often described as the "sick man of Europe" and Glasgow in particular has a remarkably bad life expectancy - the "Glasgow Effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_effect I can strongly recommend Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari a personal account of a d…
Haven't seen this data in the form of an interactive map before.
For anyone else wondering "Geographic Access" is based on public transport times to selected public services. This is outline in the methodology documentation [0].
Re: As Scotland's 'Trainspotting' Generation Ages, the Dead Pile Up
#10This is a particularly active political issue too – drug policy is at present a reserved matter of the UK government, which means the devolved government of Scotland is missing some important tools they could use to help deal with the issue.
This something that the pro-independence Scottish government are making quite a bit of noise about now; some of it is probably opportunism, but Scotland's drug culture is different enough that it certainly seems to require different tools. In particular, there is pressure among some people for the introduction of safe drug consumption facilities, with the idea being that this keeps people off the street, with access to medical care, in the system, and with support to help them recover. These are currently prohibited in the UK.
We'll see what happens over the next few years, of course. The current UK government is unlikely to be giving any concessions.