Test Your Drugs Kids: The Fight For Harm Reduction At Scottish Universities
Hamish Rae (left) and Elli Schwartz (right). Image credit: Hamish Rae
Smoking cannabis from accommodation windows, snorting cocaine at parties, taking MDMA pills at nightclubs – university students have seen and often done it all. While the management of universities mostly stick to a zero-tolerance approach to drugs, some students campaign for a harm reduction approach to them.
Andy Paterson is a fourth-year student of politics at the University of Stirling, where he co-founded the campaign Help Not Harm: “Harm reduction is all about trying to make sure that nobody is injured, hurt, or killed by the use of drugs.”
Although there are no definitive statistics on students using drugs at universities, two surveys by the National Union of Students (NUS) report the number of students who have used drugs at 30% and 56%, while the Tab’s survey said that the number goes up to almost 90% at some UK universities.
In any case, Paterson believes students need to be educated better than they were in high school: “It was very much don’t do drugs, drugs are bad, you’ll be a bad person if you do drugs, which is ridiculous and is not helpful in the slightest, and more often than not can actually cause more harm than the drug use itself”.
There are few places where better drug education would be more useful than Scotland, where the drug misuse death rate is far above not only other regions in the UK but also across Europe. In 2020, 1,339 people died of drug misuse in Scotland. In their memory and all the others before them, harm reduction campaigner Peter Krykant organised a remembrance ceremony on International Overdose Awareness Day. Paterson had worked with Krykant in 2021 during his local elections campaign, but it was here, in front of the Scottish Parliament, where Paterson decided he wanted to make harm reduction the focus of his activism as well as his academic study.
“There was a speech made there by a family member of someone who died of an overdose. And I feel terrible that I can’t remember their name. Essentially, what they said was that drug users often don’t get seen as people with problems. They’re seen as problems in general. And it’s the fact that these people don’t just die, but it’s what these people could have been also dying with them. I think that really hit me in a big way just because people will say it’s people in their 40s and 50s, older drug users in Scotland, who are dying, but there is an uptick in young people who are dying,” said Paterson.
Although students tend to avoid using opioids (such as heroin and morphine) and benzodiazepines (such as Valium and Xanax), which are the leading cause of drug deaths in Scotland, drugs preferred by students carry their own risks. If alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine aren’t counted, the most popular drug among students by far is cannabis. Other popular choices are ketamine, MDMA, cocaine, hallucinogens, and nitrous oxide known as laughing gas.
As part of the Help Not Harm campaign, Paterson is trying to educate students about the safest way to use these drugs. He has partnered up with Crew, a harm reduction charity, who provided the campaign with leaflets teaching people about the dosages, effects, and dangers of different drugs.
A Help Not Harm sign outside of the University of Stirling
At Glasgow University, the Harm Reduction Society led by Elli Schwarz, a third-year international politics and sociology student, and Hamish Rae, a fourth-year pharmacology student, is trying to launch an entire module that would teach students about harm reduction. Rae said it would talk about “what to do in emergency cases, in overdoses, how to use drugs safely, how to dose”. They would like the university to make it available for everyone and compulsory for students caught with drugs instead of disciplining them and reporting them to the police.
After reviving the dormant society last year, Schwarz and Rae have worked with organisations Students for Sensible Drug Policy, through which they are working on becoming certified peer educators, and Scottish Drugs Forum, which provides overdose prevention and naloxone training. Naloxone is a medication used to reverse an opioid overdose – any person with training can carry it in the form of a nose spray, administer it, and save a life.
While common harm reduction practices like taking drugs in a safe environment, staying hydrated, researching the drug before using it, and taking time off between using drugs are common according to the NUS’s survey, only 6% of students test their drugs, and less than half of them are aware that it’s possible.
Making drug testing kits free and easily accessible for students is part of Paterson’s goal. The students behind Help Not Harm have passed a motion through the Stirling Students’ Union making the Union provide free drug testing kits right at the university campus, no questions asked.
Testing kits for various drugs
Paterson said: “Ever since COVID, there’s been a rise in the cutting of powder drugs. So MDMA or cocaine have started to be mixed with things that are very, very not good for you.” Especially worrying has been the appearance of fentanyl. The extremely potent opioid can be mixed in with other drugs like heroin and cocaine, and if the drugs are not tested, fentanyl’s strength can cause people to overdose easily.
Paterson, Schwartz, and Rae would all like to see not only universities’ but also the UK’s drug policy change. Would they legalise drugs? “The short answer is yes. But if you said we should legalise drugs tomorrow, I’d say absolutely not. So really the question is how do you get society to the point where we can use drugs in a way that is safest for everyone? Before you get to legalisation there are so many stepping stones. You’ve got your safe injection rooms, you’ve got even just making medical cannabis, for example, medical ketamine more available,” said Rae. Schwartz agreed and added that decriminalisation is needed first: “Don’t criminalise people who do drugs, it’s stupid. They suffer from it, people suffer in jail, people suffer from stigma.”
Paterson thinks independence needs to come first though because it is Westminster that decides drug laws, not Holyrood. Paterson believes legalisation would bring millions to the Scottish economy; people imprisoned for nonviolent drug offences could go back to work, and the money generated would be taxed, unlike on the black market. “It needs to be planned, and it needs to be carefully done, and it needs to be completely publicly owned. We can’t have any private companies coming in and trying to market to anyone,” said Paterson. He’d like to see packaging done similarly to tobacco or paracetamol – with adverse health effects plainly visible on the cover or on a leaflet.
Society needs to accept that people take drugs – leaving young people in the dark is dangerous and costs lives, the three campaigners agree. Schwartz’s personal experiences when growing up in Berlin led her to the harm reduction campaign: “I’ve seen lots of people struggling with addiction from a very young age, and I myself had my own issues with that as well. I was always just left asking why is that happening. Why are drugs so bad? How can they be so bad if everyone is doing it?” After discovering prohibition was the problem, she was motivated to “try to make some change in that area so that fewer people have to have some of the experiences that I had”.
