Theresa May showed this week she is blind to the suffering of drug addicts and their families.

The Prime Minister was asked how many more families was she willing to see devastated by drug deaths before she allows Glasgow to open a safe drug consumption facility.

Her answer was it didn’t matter how many people died in this way because the law comes first.

She is willing to sacrifice these lives at the Tory altar of Law and Order.

She ruled out the opening of any such facility and condemned Glasgow to the failed war on drugs approach.

She doesn’t care as long as she is seen as being tough on crime, she might cling on to what support she has left in the affluent towns of England.

When the young Theresa naughtily ran though the wheat fields in Oxfordshire she didn’t come across many drug addicts.

In her constituency, of Maidenhead, drug deaths are thankfully rare compared to other places.

They do occur however as a 25 year-old woman was found dead from a heroin overdose a pub toilet in Maidenhead two years ago.

But the overall rate for drug related deaths in Windsor and Maidenhead is 0.9 per 100,000.

Compare that with Blackpool, in Lancashire, the worst in England and Wales, where it is 14 deaths per 100,000 population.

The difference is enormous. So then, compare it with Glasgow, where 24 people per 100,000 of the population died from a drug related death in the last year.

Glasgow, where the council and health board want to try and reduce this and get people help by opening the safe drug consumption room, has seen the number of deaths soar to 192 in the last year, which is more than double what it was ten years ago.

In refusing to even engage with authorities in Glasgow on the issue the Prime Minister is ignoring evidence and research from other countries.

There are safe drug consumption rooms in cities all over Europe.

In the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Portugal consumption rooms all offer this form of support and it works.

In Barcelona and Berlin they even have mobile units.

In Copenhagen a SDCR has been operating since 2012, it hasn’t solved the problem but it has undoubtedly saved lives.

There have been around 500 overdoses on the premises in those six years but not one death.

Five hundred overdoses which would have happened on the streets, in flats or derelict buildings had there not been the SDCF.

The people survived because medical staff are on hand to supervise the taking of drugs and intervene immediately.

European Union research has shown that consumption rooms reduces risks like needle sharing. Also in Sydney, Australia there was a reduction in the number of emergency call outs during the opening hours of the drug consumption facility.

The same research showed in Vancouver, Canada consumption rooms led to an increase in people taking up detox and referrals to addiction care centres.

Theresa, it is time to take you head out of the sand, recognise the current approach is not working for a city like Glasgow and let those who do care about it get on with doing something that will actually help.