Another report, another set of recommendations, another statement that more needs to be done.

On the day the Drug Deaths Taskforce published its final report, like every other day in recent years, three people will likely have died in a drug-related death.

In the three years since the taskforce was set up, more than 3000 people have lost their lives.

READ MORE: Drug Deaths Taskforce final report calls for new approach in Scotland

Many of the recommendations are, as the drug policy minister said, included in other reports and work is under way.

What does the report say?

It made 20 recommendations, underpinned by 10 principles with 139 actions to tackle the crisis.

People with lived experience must be at the heart of the solution. Yes, we have heard that many times before.

Leaders must be accountable. Well, no-one is ever going to say they shouldn’t.

There should be a public health approach. Yes, the government is signed up to that already.

READ MORE: Drug Death Taskforce final report branded a 'farce' that offers 'little change as deaths continue'

An anti-stigma plan, more long-term funding, a workforce action plan, review groups to learn lessons, on and on it goes.

The report goes on for more than 130 pages.

More naloxone, drug consumption facilities, drug testing and checking.

All of which we have heard before and many are yet to be implemented.

Naloxone is good. It reverses a heroin overdose and saves a life.

Most drug deaths however include more than one substance and often it is benzodiazepines, like street valium, that kills, present in 73% of deaths.

This has exploded, from present in 58 deaths in 2015 to 879 in 2020.

Naloxone saves a life, until the next time, when there may not be someone there to administer the jag.

Naloxone can help keep someone alive until such time as they are ready to get help to become drug-free.

Safer drug consumption rooms, if one is ever put in place in Glasgow, can also help keep people alive by reducing the risk of overdose.

Again, they can keep people alive until the are ready to seek the help needed to become drug-free.

READ MORE: Elitist approach to drugs policy must end if we want results

This is the part where it all falls down.

Countless people working or volunteering in the services and, more importantly, people trying to access services will tell you there is not enough of the right help available.

Why else would people be dying at a rate of three a day?

Before the drug death taskforce was set up, when the Scottish Government still had its “eye off the ball” in Nicola Sturgeon’s own words, a group held a meeting in Possilpark, launching its own report with 23 recommendations for tackling the drug deaths crisis.

People spoke at the meeting.

People who had experience of the chaos a life with addiction brings.

People who had lost sons or daughters, real people, not numbers, who were alive one day and dead the next.

At the heart of their recommendations was access to treatment. The people who spoke were begging for treatment.

Treatment that will help them live a life free of drugs, not in a state of limbo where their condition was managed and they are held in a system for decades.

In short, they wanted to get well.

Since that meeting in 2019 around 3000 people have died. Thousands more have either started using drugs in a harmful way and are on the path to being one of the many who are at risk of death.

The Scottish Government was finally shamed into action when the drug death total hit record levels year after year and people started paying attention.

Since then, reports have been commissioned, a taskforce set up, a national mission declared.

All the while people from their teens to their 60s continue to die.

The drug policy minister said the National Drugs Mission Oversight Group will now monitor the implementation of the taskforce recommendations.

The campaigners at that meeting in Possilpark are also researchers and support providers and are on the frontline witnessing the deeply personal misery and mayhem of problematic drug use.

Peter Krykant, who was at the Possilpark meeting and who took matters into his own hands and set up his own overdose prevention site in Glasgow from a converted van, said the recommendations could have been implemented years ago.

Annemarie Ward, chief executive of Favor, who held that meeting in Possilpark, branded the Drug Deaths Taskforce report a “farce”.

It is their friends and families, our fellow citizens, who are suffering and dying.

They don’t need a report to tell them how serious the problem is. They know.

They don’t need three years to go away and study the situation and tell others what is going on. They know.

The campaign has a slogan and every time a new report is published and a minister says action will be taken it is even more pertinent.

Politicians know all about campaign slogans, often they are vague, aspirational, designed to make people warm to their ideas and vote for their party or support their cause.

This one is different. This one is blunt, straightforward and uncomfortable for people in power.

“You keep talking, we keep dying”.

It is more than a campaign slogan. It is the truth.