In your briefing today:

📣 Scotland’s grim drug death toll has taken another turn for the worse: after more positive figures last year, deaths rose 11% to return to close to their 2020 peak with 1,133 people losing their lives to drugs in 2025.

New figures from National Records of Scotland show cocaine was implicated in more than half of the deaths, although opioids (78%) are the dominant drug class. Deaths from nitazines, an emerging class of synthetic drug, are up 225% year on year.

The rate of drug use deaths was higher than the Scotland average in Glasgow City, Dundee City, North Ayrshire, Inverclyde, West Dunbartonshire, and East Ayrshire, when measured over the five-year period 2021 to 2025. (BBC) (Mail)

📣 An OpenAI agent has hacked Australia’s Medicare, the country’s universal healthcare system, accessing a statistics portal containing private data, in what is the first known rogue AI breach of a government body.

It’s not only the hack that is causing concern: the breach happened in June, but OpenAI only realised it in August and didn’t tell the Australian government until 10 September, in an email.

The Australian government has said overnight it has launched a “rapid review” of AI laws and governance in response.

📣 A judge has ordered the White House to immediately restore access to several news outlets that President Donald Trump banned over what he called “fake news”. CNN, MS NOW and Politico had all found their correspondents locked out of the White House, their passes siezed, after incurring the President’s wrath for their coverage. (AP)

📣 Public Service Reform Secretary Ivan McKee insists that trade unions will not be allowed to dictate the Scottish Government’s hybrid working policy for civil servants, amid controversy over how many people actually turn up to the office. (Herald)

📣 Nurse Sandie Peggie has told an employment tribunal she did not believe her union representative took her objections to sharing a changing space with a trans-identifying man as seriously as she did. (BBC) (Times)

📣 Scotland’s waste sector is lobbying for more landfill space amid a “perfect storm” of problems, including a broken-down incinerator, which could leave rubbish piling up on Glasgow’s streets. (BBC)

📣 A single helicopter will be on standby to tackle future wildfires in Scotland - critics say that’s not enough. (Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 China’s President XI arrived in Washington last night, preceded by a softening of the US stance against China, which had previously been accused of acting against US interests, spying and supporting Iran. (New York Times)

📣 If we had a general election tomorrow, we’d get a hung parliament: Reform would win fewer seats than Labour and the Conservatives, a new poll suggests. (Times)

📣 Britain should rejoin the EU within 10 years, Tony Blair has told Andy Burnham. The former Prime Minister’s institute has also called for Keir Starmer’s “red lines” against rejoining the single market to be ditched, immediately. (Independent)

📣 Millions of people are unaware they have high blood pressure and only half of those being treated for it by GPs have it under control, new research in England has revealed. (Guardian)

📣 The ban on alcohol in football stadium stands in England could be scrapped. (Sun)

⚽️ Celtic announced their financial results: they’re almost as disappointing as their on-field form, recording a loss of £4.8 million last year (down from a £33.9m profit the previous year), reflecting a tumultuous year. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Rangers star Nicolas Raskin, off on international duty with Belgium, has spoken of his “disappointment” he didn’t get a move away in the summer transfer window. (Sun)

🏉 Gregor Brown says he’s ready to fill the number eight jersey for both Glasgow, and Scotland. (Scotsman)

🗣️ The news that the death toll from Scotland’s drugs problem is up, again, sent me down a rabbit hole of research yesterday. Claim and counterclaim, passionate debate clashing with dusty, academic discussion.

And, of course, while the bickering continues, the figures would suggest another three people have died since the statistics came out yesterday morning.

We won’t solve Scotland’s drug death problem here, but I’ll try to make sense of what I found.

First, diving into the top line of the National Records of Scotland numbers, we should look at the evolving anatomy of the crisis.

Cocaine is a rapidly growing problem, and one causing more deaths: implicated in more than half the total toll last year, up 23% on the year.

Nitazenes are the other drug group on the rise in this grim chart: potent synthetic opioids which were implicated in 247 deaths last year, up 225%, from 76 in 2024. Edinburgh Live conducted an investigation into them earlier in the year, finding them only too easy to score on the streets of the capital.

We also know it’s mostly men dying from drugs (three times as many men as women) and that those dying are middle-aged: the average age of the dead has risen from the low 30s in 2000 to the mid-40s last year. The Scotsman, today, reports that this aspect of the numbers is being blamed on dealers “divvying up” drugs by adding synthetic opioids, which are killing men in poor health.

Finally, we also know that people from deprived backgrounds are overwhelmingly more likely to die than those from better-off places: the rate of drug-related deaths is 15 times as high in the most deprived areas compared to the least.

All that’s pretty clear, then? Not so fast. First, I saw an unusually bald claim from Fraser Nelson, the Times columnist for whom I have, professionally, plenty of time: he posted on X:

This was… a surprise. As we’ve already read, data from the studiously neutral National Records of Scotland shows an undeniable, clear link between poverty and death from drug use. Others might argue - and did - that Nelson’s (unsourced) data, above, contained a number of markers of poverty.

Nelson didn’t follow that Tweet up, and doesn’t write his Times column until tomorrow: maybe we’ll see more from him to back this up, then. I’ll link to it if and when.

A more complete, and impassioned, contribution came from Annemarie Ward, CEO of drug recovery charity Favor UK and a frequently heard - and not uncontroversial - voice around the Scottish Government’s “National Mission” towards reducing the death toll. You can read her full X post here, or click on the video below.

tl;dr: She is not a fan of the government’s current approach, which she believes is failing. It should, she says, do something different - built around getting people “clean” off drugs, not helping them consume safely, or work to make their drug supplies safer.

In the Guardian, Kirsten Horsburgh of the Scottish Drugs Forum focused in on nitazenes, and also pointed to the complexity of the crisis. “The truth is that these deaths are shaped by a much wider set of factors, including poverty, trauma, deprivation, housing insecurity and mental health inequality.”

We’ll doubtless see more columnists add to the debate in the days ahead. An early entrant is Tom Harris in the Telegraph: he pins it on our political leadership, calling the death toll “a moral stain on the SNP”.

“Drugs policy in Scotland is failing, not because of a lack of devolved powers, but because of a lack of political commitment and abilities of the people elected to run the devolved government,” he writes.

“To test that thesis, simply imagine that today’s figures had shown a significant improvement: would Maree Todd and her colleagues be refusing to accept the credit?”

We would, I suspect, all wish she had the chance.

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