Our quarterly report

The Drugs Team at Public Health Scotland (PHS) has compiled this RADAR quarterly report of drug-related indicators.

The objective of this report is to monitor drug-related harms, service usage and toxicology data, in order to provide an early warning of emerging drug trends and identify actions to reduce and prevent drug harms and deaths.

View a printable version of this report.

Update

The suspected drug death section in this publication was revised on 4 June 2024 to include updated data for January and February 2024 due to data quality and completeness issues. This means that the number of suspected drug deaths occurring in the period covered by this report was higher than previously stated. The revisions are as follows:

• January 2024: number of deaths was revised from 96 to 103
• February 2024: number of deaths was revised from 86 to 95
• December 2023 to February 2024: number of deaths was revised from 278 to 294

Updates are defined by ^R or (R).

Acknowledgements

This report reflects the collective efforts of different organisations and hundreds of people in frontline and supporting roles who record, organise, analyse and interpret information from a range of sources and services.

We gratefully acknowledge the continued commitment and effort of all those involved.

Data and reporting period

RADAR's emphasis is on reporting drug-related information as rapidly as possible, for the purpose of public health surveillance. This means that data may not be fully validated and may be subject to change. Further analysis of these data will be made available in our Accredited official statistics publications on substance use.

Observed changes in indicators may reflect genuine trends in behaviours but may also be influenced by factors such as the configuration of services, or data quality and completeness issues.

Different time periods may be reported across the different indicators. In all cases, the most recently available data are used. Most charts show Scotland-level data based upon a two-year time series. Location and time series can be customised in the RADAR dashboard (external website).

The next release of this publication will be 30 July 2024.

Dashboard

Data for most of the harm and service indicators in this report are published in our new RADAR dashboard (external website).

In the dashboard, the time series can be adjusted and the data can be filtered by NHS board.

This dashboard supersedes the substance use section of the COVID-19 wider impacts dashboard (external website), which has now been decommissioned.

For optimal viewing and interaction, we recommend accessing the dashboard using a computer with a large screen. Accessing via a mobile phone may reduce the functionality.