At last, Britain has a legal drug consumption room – thanks to one man's civil disobedience | Kojo Koram

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This week, the city of Glasgow opened the first legal drug consumption room in the UK. Users at the Thistle can inject drugs in a safe and clean environment under the watchful eye of qualified healthcare professionals. Evidence indicates that this practice reduces drug deaths and the spread of infectious diseases. And while it might sound like a scary new idea to British ears, you can find these rooms in cities from Vancouver to Sydney; in fact, the first such room was opened in Berne, Switzerland all the way back in 1986.

Since the early 2000s, experts have been calling for safe consumption rooms to be set up in Britain’s drug hotspots. But efforts to introduce this vital harm-reduction service were frustrated for years, even in Scotland – once christened the “drug death capital of the world”. While this week the attention will understandably fall on the medical professionals and municipal authorities responsible for getting the Thistle off the ground, it is worth taking a moment to remember that none of this would probably have happened if it were not for the actions of one member of that demonised population, drug users, a few years ago.

In 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the former heroin user and drug intervention worker Peter Krykant realised that as support services shut their doors for lockdown, Glasgow’s drug-taking population would die in even greater numbers unless someone did something. Krykant also knew that, according to global evidence, the most effective way to lower the number of dangerous drug deaths was to give people somewhere they could use drugs in a safe environment. This is because much of the danger of drugs comes from sharing needles, injecting in dirty back alleys or repeatedly injecting into damaged veins. Safe consumption rooms mean that at least people are using drugs in a supervised and sanitary environment.

Krykant converted an old minivan into a makeshift safe consumption room and loaded it up with clean syringes, bottled water and naloxone kits (the life-saving drug that can reverse an opioid overdose). In his van, which he later upgraded to a converted ambulance, Krykant oversaw nearly 900 injections from local drug users, treating nine overdoses in the vehicle. This risky act of direct action took a personal toll, he told me, on his family relationships and his own sobriety. And it nearly cost him his freedom: in October 2020, he was charged for allegedly obstructing police who sought to search his van. The charges were eventually dropped after public pressure.

“It took somebody ruining their life for them [politicians] to say they could do something about it [the drugs crisis], and that person was me,” Krykant told me when I asked him how he felt about the safe consumption room. His safe consumption van not only saved lives but ramped up pressure on the Scottish governmen. In 2023, the lord advocate, Scotland’s principal legal adviser, announced that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute people using safe consumption rooms, opening the legal door for what would become the Thistle. Krykant’s protest had succeeded. But it came at great personal sacrifice.

“I’m not in a good place, now,” he said. “And that all stems from when I took the decision to go out and run that van.”

It is fortunate that from this week onwards, some of the most vulnerable Glaswegians will be able to access a facility that might save their lives and give them a chance to get better. If all goes well, it could inspire other UK cities struggling with dangerous drug deaths to push the government to allow them to launch their own schemes. Yet as is often the way with direct action, it is the brave souls who are willing to be the first through the breach who get pelted with all the arrows.

For nearly 40 years we have known what works. Until this week, there were more than 100 safe consumption rooms in the world, but not in the city that arguably needed one most. Why? Ultimately, because politicians in Scotland and the rest of the UK were too afraid of bad headlines to take the action that was needed. But Peter Krykant wasn’t. As he works on his own recovery behind the scenes, it is important that we remember that the road to change isn’t always paved with patient parliamentary lobbying. Sometimes, a bit of civil disobedience goes a long way.