Annual figures show a drop in drug deaths but Scotland continues to have the worst rate in Europe.
The number of people who died due to drug misuse in Scotland last year fell by 279 to the lowest level for five years.It is the first significant drop following several years of record high totals.Despite the fall in drug misuse deaths, they are still more than three times as common as they were two decades ago.
Opiates and opioids, including heroin, morphine and methadone, were implicated in more than eight out of 10 drug-related deaths in 2022. The rate of drug poisoning deaths in Scotland was 2.7 times as high as the UK average in 2021, the most recent year that data is available for the UK as a whole.Julie Ramsay, head of demographic statistics at National Records of Scotland, said drug deaths had been rising for two decades, with a particularly sharp increase after 2013.
Over the past two decades, drug misuse deaths in Scotland has increased most years, with the largest rise in 2018.The figure for 2022 was 19.8 deaths for every 100,000 people in Scotland.The Glasgow City Council area had the highest rate of drug misuse deaths over a five-year period closely followed by Dundee City .
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