This Is How Austerity Is Exacerbating Dundee’s Drugs Crisis

“I’ve taken drugs from an early age but it was recreational drugs,” she explains.

“And then after my boyfriend was murdered in 2010, in front of me and my son, I started up heroin, hitting heroin up. I was able to talk more about things after I had heroin. I just couldn’t speak about it. But it just made it calmer. It just blocks out your bad memories. For a little while. Then it comes back.”

Dundee’s drug culture is much worse than it was 15 years ago, Nicolson claims, explaining that teenagers don’t know what they’re taking these days. “It’s just dancing with the devil,” she says. Nicholson has three sons – Sean, Lee and Jamie Jay. She had another son, Jack, who she describes as “so perfect”. But Jack died in of a heart attack in 2017 after taking a drug doing the rounds called Red Levis.

“He had a cardiac arrest,” Nicolson says. “His friends took him back to his dad, and his Dad was just thinking he was smashed and so just gave him a glass of water, and he went to his bed. When he got up at 7.20am, Jack was dead. He had blood and foam coming out of his mouth.”

Nicolson stopped taking drugs in memory of her son, who was only 17 when he died. “I really got clean in Jack’s name,” she says.

But she says her home city is getting worse and there are no decent jobs for young people. “I can’t remember it being as bad as what it is now. If you go for a job, there’s about 50 people behind you.”

In Douglas, a housing scheme in East Dundee, Samantha Fern’s daughter, Ellie, who is now nine, is now cared for by Samantha’s mother Liz Johnston.

Johnston thinks Ellie needs counselling but says that professional help is hard to find. There was nobody there to offer her support after Samantha died. Johnston went back to work too early and couldn’t cope.  In January this year she suffered a breakdown.

Losing a child is one of the worst things anyone could endure, Johnston says. “I don’t think there’s anything else I could go through in life that would be worse than that. Because that is somebody I brought into this world. She was part of me for nine months, in my body. That’s like somebody’s ripped something out of me, and it’s gone. I know I’ve got other children and I love them just the same. But, until you bury a child, you don’t know what that’s like.”

The Austerity Era

Almost ten years ago the Conservative government introduced a policy of austerity – a sustained reduction in public spending, welfare reform and tax rises – in response to the 2008 economic crash. Between 2010 and 2019 cuts of more than£30 million have been made to welfare, housing and social services, according to the United Nations. Cuts have been made to budgets from policing to health.

Poverty has risen dramatically over the decade. Almost one in five people in Scotland now live in poverty, and for children the situation is worse, with one in four in poverty. The use offood banks doubles when Universal Credit is rolled out,  homelessness increased,crime rates are up, as well ashospital waiting lists.

The UK government says austerity is now over. It expects tolift the freeze on working age benefits in April 2020 in line with inflation and sayspublic spending increased this year by 4.1 per cent.

A spokesperson said: “The UK government spends over £95 billion a year on welfare, and we have simplified the benefits system through universal credit – making it easier for people to access support, including care leavers. Under personal independence payments, a higher proportion of disabled claimants are receiving the top rate of support.”