In 2025, Thomas Delaney was invited to visit The Thistle – the UK’s first official drug consumption room. In this essay, Thomas reflects on his changing views of recovery, and the ongoing need to challenge stigma and misinformation in the media.
Last January, The Thistle opened its doors in Glasgow, Scotland. The facility, located on Hunter Street in the city’s East End, provides a sterile, supervised space for people to use drugs in the presence of trained health and social care professionals.
The Thistle was introduced to reduce the harms of public injecting in a city recognised as the epicentre of Scotland’s drug deaths crisis. In 2024, there were 1,017 drug-related deaths registered in Scotland. This was a decrease of 13% compared with 2023, and yet “Scotland continues to have one of the highest drug death rates in the developed world”.
On 23 July 2025, I visited The Thistle for the first time. I was invited by its Operational Manager, Dan Daly, after a conversation we had on LinkedIn. The Thistle was entirely unlike the place I had imagined. That visit prompted me to reconsider my scepticism about drug consumption rooms, and unpack what had influenced my views.
Recovery culture
When I first heard about Glasgow’s plans for a drug consumption room, I wasn’t convinced; in fact, I was deeply opposed. At the time, I was receiving treatment for ketamine addiction in a Glasgow-based rehabilitation facility. While in treatment, I came to believe that recovery required firm boundaries, including the rejection of anything that appeared to support substance use. I perceived harm reduction as a misuse of public funds that risked undermining ‘real recovery’.
In rehab, staff with lived experience of addiction often promoted a strictly abstinence-based approach. At the time, this felt like the only legitimate pathway to recovery, and it shaped how I understood addiction and what it meant to get better.
I began to unpack some of my beliefs about recovery and harm reduction during my undergraduate research project. In ‘Framing addiction: Media representations and the impact on societal perceptions in Glasgow, 2019–2025’, I examined how public support for drug consumption rooms and other forms of harm reduction have been undermined by stigma and sensationalism within Scotland’s mainstream media.
Stigmatising headlines
In Glasgow-based coverage from 2019 to 2025, I observed recurring depictions of people who use drugs as deviant, dangerous, or morally weak. Terms like ‘junkie’ and ‘zombie’ appeared repeatedly – framing drug use as a personal failing and stripping people of dignity. This is what sociologist Dr Erving Goffman described as the ‘spoiled identity’ – where a person’s whole existence is reduced to a single negative label. Professor Imogen Tyler has explored this more recently, discussing how stigma is a ‘machine’ that reinforces inequality, targeting people who are already on the margins.
I also saw headlines that sensationalised drug consumption rooms – for example, calling them ‘shooting galleries’ and ‘heroin dens’. The Scottish Daily Mail ran a headline about “armies of zombie addicts”. These words weren’t neutral; it is easy to see how they could manufacture fear and resistance to The Thistle.
When I visited The Thistle, the environment was calm, clinical, and very welcoming. People were greeted by name, treated with respect, and offered far more than a supervised space to use substances; they were routinely supported to engage with healthcare, housing, and recovery services. Rather than the chaotic ‘heroin den’ I had come to expect, The Thistle felt more akin to a trendy community health clinic.
What the evidence shows
Research from the Scottish Drugs Forum showed that most Scots would support drug consumption rooms if presented with accurate information. I reviewed the literature around drug consumption rooms for my undergraduate dissertation, and found the evidence in favour of drug consumption rooms to be compelling. Studies have demonstrated their capacity to reduce the risk of overdose, overdose mortality, and transmission of blood-borne viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C, as well as to facilitate engagement with treatment and support services. A feasibility study commissioned by the City of Edinburgh Council concluded that “there is a strong case” for implementing further drug consumption rooms in Scotland.
Despite the growing body of evidence, positive outcomes have remained largely absent from mainstream UK media coverage. My own research indicates that the negative (and incomplete) framing has sustained misconceptions about this form of harm reduction. Even supportive media coverage has struggled to counteract entrenched narratives fostered by years of fear-driven reporting. In this climate, politicians have faced sustained public pressure to delay, dilute, or block harm-reduction measures, irrespective of evidence-based recommendations, such as those from Home Affairs Select Committee on drugs policy, the Independent Working Group on Drug Consumption Rooms, and the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
The politics of representation
Effective public health measures rely not only on a strong scientific basis, but also on how those public health measures are presented to the public. My research found that media coverage rarely featured the voices of people with lived experience, peer-led organisations, or frontline workers. Instead, media narratives leaned heavily on police commentary and political talking points. This reflects Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘cultural hegemony’: the process through which the values and assumptions of powerful groups come to be seen as natural or ‘common sense’. In this case, ideas centred on abstinence, punishment, and personal responsibility were repeatedly reinforced through the press, while alternative perspectives received far less attention.
Dr Michel Foucault’s work on ‘discourse’ also applies here. He said that “discourse is not simply to say things, it is to do things with words, to construct knowledge and to govern reality”. In this way, media outlets do not simply report events; they actively shape what counts as the truth about events. When The Thistle is framed as a ‘controversial experiment’ rather than a justifiable public health measure, it distorts public understanding and hinders political progress.
The Thistle’s existence is largely due to a shift in political attitudes towards drug policy in Scotland and ongoing advocacy by health professionals and recovery advocate groups. In 2023, Scotland’s Lord Advocate published a statement saying that “it would not be in the public interest to prosecute drug users for simple possession offences committed within a pilot safer drugs consumption facility” – allowing the project to move forward after years of legal and political stalemate.
I believe that if Scotland is to build lasting support for harm reduction, media coverage must change. This would mean replacing fear-driven narratives with context, centring lived experience, and rejecting language that perpetuates stigma. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire argued that dialogue is the starting point for transformation; communities need the tools to question dominant narratives and the opportunity to create new ones.
Reframing the narrative
When I first started thinking about drug consumption rooms, they didn’t align with the dominant narratives of abstinence, responsibility, and willpower that shaped much of the media coverage and the recovery culture I was part of. Drug consumption rooms were presented in opposition to abstinence-based recovery rather than as a complement to it. Repeated enough times, I started to accept this as common sense, without questioning it.
I continue to practise abstinence-based recovery, shaped by my own experiences and by witnessing relapse and loss among peers. For me, abstinence has provided stability. But what works for one person does not work for everyone. With distance and time, I have come to recognise that recovery is rarely straightforward. While abstinence remains central in my life, I have become more open to the idea that people follow different paths.
Dr Saket Priyadarshi, Associate Medical Director at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, described drug consumption rooms as “another part of a system of care, another piece of the jigsaw responding to a very complex problem”. The success of places like The Thistle will depend not only on results but also on whether the public recognises them as healthcare rather than a moral compromise.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned from visiting The Thistle was how much damage is caused by listening to the noise. For me, it was only by stepping inside the space itself, away from headlines and assumptions, that the reality of the service became clear. Today, I see drug consumption rooms not as a contradiction of the recovery that works for me, but rather as a necessary part of a compassionate system that recognises that recovery does not start in the same place for everyone.
Thomas Delaney is a public speaker and Founder and CEO of YouthWISE, a trauma-informed drug education programme designed for schools and youth settings. He is currently undertaking a Master’s degree in Adult Learning, Community Development, and Youth Work Practice at the University of Glasgow.
In 2025, Thomas graduated with a first-class Bachelor’s degree in Community Development from the University of Glasgow. His dissertation explored how addiction is framed in the media and the profound impact these portrayals have on public perception, stigma, and policy.
Thomas has been featured in LadBible, The Metro, BBC Radio Scotland, The Epoch Times, and The Guardian.
Information about the number of people attending The Thistle, the number of injecting episodes, and the number of medical emergencies is available to view on the Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership website. Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Glasgow are conducting an independent evaluation of The Thistle, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research.
The opinions expressed in this post reflect the views of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the opinions or official positions of the SSA.
The SSA does not endorse or guarantee the accuracy of the information in external sources or links and accepts no responsibility.
