Our social media recently featured Service Manager’s from our Homelessness and Prevention services detailing what makes their service successful and challenging the stigma around Homelessness.
I bet we’ve all also had times in our lives where our inability to make a decision has led to a situation where not making any decision becomes a decision itself, usually with dire consequences too.
People with lived and living experience of homelessness, alcohol and other drug use, the justice system, mental ill health and learning disabilities have an enormous contribution to make to services offered by Turning Point Scotland.
We welcome this long-awaited statement by the Lord Advocate, and agree with the position taken that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute anyone using a Safer Consumption Facility (SCF) for possession.
At Turning Point Scotland, we have led by example to engage and influence our sector in tackling stigmatising language associated with all of our areas of support in social care. But we realised that some of the language we used to describe our Homelessness services needed careful updating.
Today, on International Overdose Awareness Day, the Home Affairs Committee (HAC) at the House of Commons has called for drug law reform and a public health approach to drug use. In July the Scottish Government published ‘A Caring, Compassionate and Human Rights Informed Drug Policy for Scotland’, calling for decriminalisation of possession of drugs for personal use.