Businesses and charities in Scotland are being urged to ban words including addict and alcoholic under plans designed to tackle the country’s drugs death crisis.
A new campaign, to be launched on Monday, aims to tackle stigma towards those who use substances, which Nicola Sturgeon’s drugs minister claimed stopped people with problems coming forward for help.
Under a new “stigma charter”, organisations will be asked to promote only “positive language” when talking about or to people who abuse substances.
It is suggested that instead of “alcoholic”, people say “person with harmful alcohol use” and that “addict” is replaced with the term “person with problematic substance use”.
Other terms that should not be used include “junkie”, “clean” and “substance abuse”, according to the new guidelines.
The Scottish Government said its new “hard-hitting” taxpayer-funded campaign, which will feature on billboards and in newspaper and TV adverts, will emphasise that addiction should be seen as a health condition and that those with a problem “should receive help and support, not judgement”.
Lack of Rehabilitation Services
However, campaigners said that while language was important, a more pressing problem in Scotland was a “woeful” lack of rehabilitation services.
Scotland has become by far the drugs death capital of Europe, with 1,339 people dying because of drug misuse last year, a figure that has risen for seven years in a row. The drugs death rate is three-and-a-half times higher than in England and Wales, while alcohol deaths are at their highest level since 2008.
“Language is powerful,” Annemarie Ward, chief executive of the charity Faces and Voices of Recovery UK, said. “It can either undermine a person’s experiences and create a culture of blame and shame or it can promote hope and show that recovery is possible by not labelling a person by the substances they use.
“But in Scotland we have a severe dearth of services available to people who want to get off alcohol and other drugs regardless of what we label them.”
