More than £1.5 million is to be spent on projects helping people in Dumfries and Galloway affected by drug use over the next five years.
We Are With You, Aberlour and NHS Dumfries and Galloway will receive the cash from the Scottish Government’s Improvement Fund and Children and Families Fund.
The latest figures showed that 44 people were believed to have died as a result of substance abuse in Dumfries and Galloway in 2021 – 15 more than the previous year.
We Are With You, which has a base in Dumfries, will use £500,000 to develop an assertive peer support service across the region.
It aims to help people work with treatment and recovery services.
Aberlour currently runs an intensive family support service, which offers help to families that have been affected by substance misuse.
It aims to use its £500,000 award to extend the service to cover Annan and Stranraer.
And NHS Dumfries and Galloway will use £520,335 to develop its first recovery and wellbeing hub, as well as a mobile hub.
The awards are part of more than £25 million worth of grants the Scottish Government awarded to nearly 80 projects, with the money being used over the next five years.
Drugs Policy Minister, Angela Constance, said: “The grants awarded will enable services to increase and improve the support available for people suffering from addiction and of course, their families.
“Getting more people into the treatment which works for them is central to our national mission and we continue to embed the new Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) standards which reinforce a rights-based approach for people who use drugs and the treatment they should expect regardless of their circumstances.
“We aim to increase the number of publicly funded residential rehabilitation placements by more than 300 per cent over the lifetime of this Parliament and I recently announced a treatment target to increase the number of people with problematic opiate drug use accessing community treatments.”
