By our Health Correspondent.
It is a common mistake to view the current state of our people in Scotland as a series of unfortunate biographical accidents, or perhaps as a collective failure of what the nineteenth-century novelists used to call “character.” When one actually walks through these post-industrial landscapes today, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that one is looking at a very deliberate, almost academic piece of urban planning. It isn’t a lack of willpower, it is a calculated harvest. We are looking at a geography that has been saturated with the most addictive substances in human history, not by chance, but by design. It is as if the landscape itself has been authored to produce a specific, predictable kind of misery.
There is a certain class of person; the “missionaries” from the leafy suburbs or the well-meaning suits in Holyrood who prefer to talk about “lifestyle choices.” This is a fascinatingly clinical way of describing what is, in reality, a dual-pronged siege. Public Health Scotland has noted that these outcomes are driven by “fundamental causes” – the unequal distribution of power, wealth, and resources – rather than just individual behaviors. On one side, you have the legal corporations operating from glass boardrooms, and on the other, the illegal cartels moving through the schemes. Both are essentially engaged in the same business model: the commodification of desperation. They have looked at the economic vacuum left by the disappearance of real work and decided to fill it with something more profitable: a feedback loop of dependency.
The data from 2024 and 2025 regarding “environmental bads” is, in its own grim way, quite remarkable. The density of off-licences, betting shops, and vape retailers in our poorest postcodes is not a “natural market response,” though economists love that particular phrase because it sounds so inevitable. It is what PHS researchers call the “commercial determinants of health” – the private sector activities that affect people’s health. It is a predatory spatial strategy. These businesses dominate the visual field. Every billboard and storefront is a constant, nagging reminder that for a small fee, you can escape the grind for ten minutes. It is a toxic environment, a language of signage that makes it nearly impossible to navigate your own neighborhood without being invited to self-destruct.
What I find most galling is the “choice” rhetoric that comes out of the middle-class political bubble. In their world, a health crisis is just a collection of poor individual decisions, as if one were simply choosing the wrong word in a sentence. They talk about “drinking responsibly” while their own back gardens are protected by the iron-clad syntax of planning laws and “conservation status.” You do not see a betting shop every ten yards in the West End or Carmunnock because that class uses its political muscle to ensure that corporate targeting happens elsewhere. They have the privilege of a “clean” environment, which is really just the privilege of not being the target of a harvest.
Then there is the matter of the “food swamps.” In the most depressed areas of Scotland, the cheapest, most accessible calories are those loaded with salt and sugar – substances that function less like nutrition and more like a low-grade, slow bullet. Public Health Scotland’s monitoring of the “Best Start Foods” and price promotion data confirms that the most aggressive marketing for HFSS (high in fat, sugar, and salt) products is concentrated precisely where families are struggling most with the cost of living. It is a form of structural violence that is perfectly legal. Poverty forces you towards addictive, low-quality fuel, which leads to chronic health issues, which then ensures you remain in poverty. It is a closed system.
The government, of course, enjoys speaking the language of “equity,” which is a very beautiful word that seems to have no material weight in a scheme. Their policies suggest that the “rights” of an alcohol giant to market its poison are significantly more sacred than the right of a family to live in a healthy environment.
Ultimately, one feels compelled to bypass the official gatekeepers entirely. If the “vanguard” isn’t coming to save us, and there is very little evidence that they are, then the only logical response is to get “hangry.” We must reclaim our streets ourselves. This means joining Community Councils to challenge the way our areas are planned, or pressuring local Councils to stand against the saturation of betting shops and off-sales. It means calling our Councillor, MSP and MP and asking them to bypass the corporate “food swamp” owners who lobby them. The first step towards fixing the health divide is the realization that we are not the authors of this unhealthy environment – huge sums of money are used against us to kill us with their cheap, chemically altered foods, addictive substances and money draining activities – but WE are the ones who need it fixed, or continue to watch our friends and family die young.
