Annemarie Ward, CEO of the addiction recovery charity FAVOR doesn't hold back in this interview with The Herald. Unlike most Scottish health organisations, she is not funded by the state - and it shows.
Here are some of the choicest quotes...
“So many aspects of their approach need to change,” she says, “but if I were to choose one then it’s this: get rid of all the addiction quangos that have grown fat on public money.”
She begins to describe a lucrative, self-serving sector which is in denial about the true nature of addiction and doesn’t really believe that people can actually recover. And so they specialise in ‘harm reduction’, which she says is “middle-class virtue-signalling at its worst”.
... She begins naming the addiction quangos and says she’ll soon be compiling a list of them to show how crowded the field is.
This is where Scotland’s public sector gravy train can be seen at full tilt, driven by a vast array of political actors who attend all the right networking events; leadership seminars and lobbying dinners.
“They’ve become a shadow state,” she says. “They’re policy actors with at least one organisation employing 70-odd staff. There’s no equivalent to them south of the border because England got rid of them years ago. They simply de-funded them as part of a structural change leading to more funding for front-line services.
“All of these Scottish quangos think they’re doing something, but they’re little more than the government lobbying government for no other purpose than to maintain funding levels.”
... “I’m willing to work with Labour. I want to contribute positively; I don’t want to be the one who’s always screaming. But if they don’t get rid of these quangos then I know they’ll just continue with the grift of government lobbying government.”
In recent weeks, she’s become a harsh critic of the Scottish Government’s Minimum Unit Pricing policy which seeks to discourage people from buying alcohol. “It simply doesn’t work,” she says, “because those making the policy have no clue about the reality of the lives of those who are worst affected by alcohol addiction.”
... “I read 40 studies around this and only seven were looking at health-based outcomes. Then I looked at who commissioned the research on all the studies and the only one that was positive about MUP was a researcher from Public Health Scotland. And it was Public Health Scotland who were writing the report. So you wonder if there’s some jiggery-pokery going on here.
“These people don’t live in the real world. If they were, they’d looking at the correlation in the rise in drugs deaths since Minimum Unit Pricing was introduced in 2018. It doesn’t need a genius to work out why. And in the meantime, I’m still burying my friends.”
“I don’t even see the problem with booze adverts. I don’t care about ‘the optics’ of a swimming pool sponsored by Tennent’s lager. The Government thinks the people in these communities are stupid and that we’re easily influenced. They’re obsessed with channelling ethics but what they’re doing in facilitating the already vast profits of the booze industry is grievously unethical.”
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