The UK Government is allowing people to die in Glasgow due to a Tory obsession with taking an ideological hardline stance on law and order.

It might win votes in huge swathes of middle England, but it is failing hundreds of families across the country, mostly in Glasgow.

Last year 190 men and women died in Glasgow as a result of drug-related deaths. 

Almost 200 people dead. It should be an emergency but it isn’t being treated as one.

It is difficult to reach any other conclusion other than their lives don’t matter enough for serious action to be taken.

READ MORE: Glasgow has 'most compelling case in Europe' for safe drug injecting room

If no action to prevent these deaths is taken the total will rise, as is predicted.

This week, the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster heard from four senior academics from Scotland on problem drug abuse.

Their evidence was clear on both the causes of problem drug abuse and also on a potential solution proven to work in other countries to reduce harm.

Theresa May, Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, and any other politician with senior cabinet ambitions, should listen to the evidence given by the four academics who have spent years researching and studying this problem.

Part of the solution is the Safer Drug Consumption Room. 

The health board and council want to open one in Glasgow but the UK Government refuses to amend drugs law that would allow illegal drugs to be taken into the premises.

Theresa May states she will not do anything that supports the illegal trade in drugs.

READ MORE: Drugs policy 'should be amended or devolved to Scotland'

When she says this, she is not speaking to the families in Glasgow devastated by drug addiction, the parents burying their son or daughter on the child in care because their parents are addicts.

Instead she is speaking to the Tory faithful, many of whom see drug addicts as much of the problem as the dealers are.

Sadly it seems votes in the Tory shires are worth more than lives in Glasgow.

But by not allowing it to be considered she is however, also supporting the illegal trade in drugs, because current policy and the practice of the last 30 years clearly has not worked. 

The 190 deaths in this city in one year are evidence of that but are clearly not important enough to for the Government to act.

The evidence from the researchers also clearly stated the reasons for problem drug abuse.

It is poverty and deprivation. The majority of the people dying now were first introduced to drugs in the 1980s and 1990s. 

They are people in their 40s and 50s who have lived with drug addiction for decades after spiralling into a life of despair and crime at the same time as unemployment was rife, opportunities limited and hope absent from communities across the city.

Then there is the personal responsibility argument. Many people lived in poverty and in deprived communities but didn’t turn to drugs.

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The research shows an unavoidable fact of why some people become problem drug users, on top of the poverty and deprivation, is adverse childhood experiences, known as ACEs. 

Experience of addiction at home, domestic abuse, child abuse, a parent in prison are just some of the ACEs that have been found to have a significant impact on people’s lives.

Tory MP Ross Thompson attempted to suggest that problem drug abuse was also a middle class problem.

However, it was explained to him gently there was a big difference between drug use and problem drug use.

By and large, middle class people who use drugs do not become problem drug users because they do not have all the other problems to contend with and have access to support networks and opportunities others in deprived communities do not.

It is a structural issue caused by long term government policies.

So, it is now time for government to adopt policies to seriously tackle to problem by accepting the international evidence.

Theresa May and Sajid Javid need to look behind the statistics and see the people.

Come to Glasgow and come to the next funeral of the next man or woman to die from drugs.