Statistics of drug-related deaths, broken down by age, sex, substances implicated in the death, underlying cause of death, and NHS Board and Council areas.

In 2020 there were 1,339 drug-related deaths, a 5% increase on the previous year and the largest number ever recorded. Drug-related deaths have been increasing since 1996 but since 2013 the upward trend has been steeper.

Scotland’s drug-death rate was over 3½ times the rate for the UK as a whole, and also higher than those reported for the other European countries for which figures are readily available. In 2019, there were 1,280 drug-related deaths registered in Scotland, representing 234 drugrelated deaths per million population. There were 4,328 such deaths in the UK, equating to 65 per million population. So the Scottish rate was 3.6 times that of the UK as a whole.