Glasgow in Brief
💉 At the start of the month, we got news that drug deaths in Scotland had fallen. Cold comfort though; they remain the worst in Europe. As if to drive home how parlous the problem remains, there have been three suspected drug-related incidents in Glasgow since last Monday involving eight people. The first happened on Cambridge Street in Cowcaddens, where a 52-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene. A 37-year-old man was also taken to hospital, where he remains in a stable condition. A 38-year-old woman was also treated by ambulance staff in the area. Then, on Friday, another incident on Cresswell Street off Byres Road which saw two more hospitalised. This was followed by another incident the following day on Renfield Lane with three more hospitalisations.
Yesterday, a drug alert from Glasgow’s health board emerged. “Some people in Glasgow have taken seriously ill after smoking crack of freebase cocaine,” the warning read. “This could be because it is very strong, it’s cut with something dangerous, or fumes from home made pipes,” it warned. Drugs campaigner Annemarie Ward has criticised language by the police and in the media of people having ‘taken unwell’. “This is not food poisoning. This is nitazines, synthetic opioids so strong they make heroin look like a wellness smoothie, now being detected in Scotland’s cocaine supply,” she wrote in The Splash. In the three months to March 2025, nitazenes were detected in 38 deaths in Scotland.
All of this has coincided with a report published today by MPs on the Scottish Affairs Committee. They made a number of suggestions and warnings, including a call for funding for The Thistle, the UK’s first safe consumption room, not to come at the expense of other efforts to reduce drug harm. They suggested that mobile facilities could be used, citing a visit to a mobile unit operating in Lisbon. (Such facilities would be at local authorities’ discretion.) They also recommended the introduction of an inhalation room for those who smoke crack as well as freebase cocaine, rather than injecting, which they said was an “important harm reduction step”. “For The Thistle to be effective, it must be able to meet the needs of the population it is trying to help, which it cannot do without an inhalation room,” the report said.
While the committee acknowledged The Thistle was not a “silver bullet”, they were informed the UK government does not support the use of safe consumption rooms, and would not make legislative changes to facilitate them, regardless of The Thistle's success during its three year pilot.
🤑 Readers of our piece on Glasgow’s bowling green land disputes may recall that the decision on the controversial plans to build 32 flats on Mount Florida Bowling Club was up for consideration yesterday. Well, after two and a half hours of representations, debates, consideration of local plans and new proposals, the motion to approve passed by eight votes to two.
Earlier this year, Noah Developments, who bought the greens and clubhouse from Mount Florida Bowling Club in 2019, submitted a second set of plans after their first was rejected in 2021. These new plans included building 32 flats and refurbishing the clubhouse and handing it, along with a patch of green space over to the community for public use. The plans were initially recommended for approval in May, but an appeal was lodged after hundreds of objections from residents, the wider community, and councillors that decried the already sparse green space in the neighbourhood. And so we arrive at yesterday’s hearing.
Councillor Eva Bollander (SNP), criticised what she saw as a lack of investigation into other potential uses for the land, and said she feels “sad” when properties are held “hostage to fortune by developers and landowners”. But, fellow SNP councillor Sean Ferguson summed up the position held by several local supporters of the plans: that the “status quo” of land locked in a planning dispute while becoming increasingly derelict “can’t continue”.
Presenting the case against the proposals, Greens councillor Holly Bruce said that the plans don’t provide sufficient greenspace and that there was “no real meaningful attempt at consultation” from Noah. Following the decision, she told The Bell she’s “devastated” for the local community. Cllr Bruce expressed dismay that members voted for “more luxury housing and a reduction in greenspace” in the context of a “housing and climate emergency”.
What this means for the community is that no bowling will take place on the site again, not for a long time, at least. As for the final members of Mount Florida Bowling Club who opted to sell the land, the £25,000 from Noah they initially split between themselves rises to £250,000, now that planning permission has been granted. We wonder what they’ll spend it on, and it probably isn’t new bowls. “A blow out with my fellow bowlers”, one former member told us, somewhat in jest.
An old-fashioned 'newspaper war'
By Evie Glen
For almost a century the Glasgow Guardian has held court under various names as the student newspaper of record amid the leafy West End surrounds of the University of Glasgow. Winner of multiple awards and once edited by Donald Dewar, the paper is an institution which started the careers of many of Glasgow’s most successful journalists.
But in October last year, a new pretender emerged to rival the Guardian, started by two former staffers who claim there is “a freedom of speech crisis in higher education”. Just six months later the Hillhead Review was named The Herald’s student newspaper of the year and was the subject of a glowing write-up by one of Glasgow’s most esteemed journalists, Kevin McKenna. His interview with the paper’s co-founders, Odhran Gallagher and Katherine McKay, praises their igniting of an old-fashioned “newspaper war”’ with the venerable Glasgow Guardian.
Gallagher and McKay defected to form the rival Review after articles they worked on were withheld from publication without cause, they say. This is disputed by former colleagues at the Guardian, who suggest the parting of ways was more likely precipitated by failed bids to be named the Guardian’s editor-in-chief.
In any case, word on campus is that the Hillhead Review formed as a protest paper intended to be everything the Glasgow Guardian — with its establishment credentials and university funding — is not. But despite the Review’s initial success, identity politics and its own staff departures now threaten the paper’s future less than a year in.
‘Classism is alive and well in Glasgow’
I first came across the Hillhead Review when it became embroiled in a row with Glasgow Students for Choice (GSC), a society that campaigns for issues around reproductive rights at the university. The dispute with GSC is one of the Review’s founding controversies, sparked by an article that accused the society of selling donated Partick Thistle FC tickets to raise money for a pro-choice charity without prior permission from the club.
Editors at the Glasgow Guardian had refused to publish the story because they had doubts about its accuracy. Gallagher and McKay dispute that account, and eventually published the story on the fledgling Review website. In January this year Gallagher rekindled the dispute with an opinion piece that interrogated classism at Scottish universities by way of a targeted, if tangential, critique of the Guardian.
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