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In 2020, local activist and former drug user Peter Krykant decided that he had had enough of seeing people dying from drug overdoses in his home town of Glasgow. So he took it upon himself to set up and operate an unsanctioned harm-reduction service. He kitted out a minivan, and later a former ambulance, to provide a mobile overdose-prevention service. He did so openly in defiance of the law and was arrested, only for the charges to be dropped. Five years later, The Thistle, the first safe consumption room in the UK, opened in Glasgow. Sadly, Krykant passed away just a few months later.

If there is a consensus on drug harms, it is that the current way the UK deals with them is failing. Scotland recently recorded its highest-ever number of annual drug deaths: 1,133 – an 11 per cent rise on the previous year. It is the country with the worst fatality rate from drugs in Europe.…