The drugs policy campaigner Peter Krykant, who has died suddenly aged 48, advanced the cause of the harm reduction movement through a transformative act of civil disobedience.
Fitting out a van as a mobile safer drug consumption space and making it available to Glasgow’s most vulnerable homeless addicts broke the law. And it also – eventually – broke the stalemate around UK drugs policy, propelled Scotland’s drug deaths crisis further up the political agenda and, most importantly, saved lives.
Krykant’s law-breaking plan coalesced in February 2020 after he attended what he saw as another talking shop – a Scottish government conference focused on drug deaths, which took place 24 hours before a UK government summit on the same subject, at the same Glasgow venue. It seemed to him a ludicrous show of escalating tensions between the two administrations.
“The conferences were the final straw, and the fact that [a drug consumption room pilot] is being used as a political football,” he told the Guardian a week later. “As a person who went through my own trauma – drug use and street homelessness issues many years ago – I cannot stand back.”
Within days of announcing his plan to purchase a vehicle and customise it as a mobile safer-injecting suite, Krykant had raised more than £2,000. He was immediately sacked from his job as an HIV outreach worker at the charity Waverley Care.
Undeterred by the looming global Covid pandemic, Krykant recognised that, as services contracted, the homeless drug users who congregated around Trongate in Glasgow were even more in need. So he struck out in the midst of lockdown, first in a minibus nicknamed “the Tank” and later in a converted ambulance, providing clean water, needles and swabs, as well as supplies of naloxone, the potentially life-saving drug that reverses the effects of opioid overdose. Rules included using your own drugs, and agreeing to an overdose intervention if needed.
Writing in the Guardian, Krykant later explained: “Overdose prevention services are an internationally recognised way of reducing drug-related harms. It benefits everyone by supporting the most vulnerable and saving taxpayers’ money on ambulance callouts, hospital admissions and council clean-up teams.”
The local police largely tolerated his activity, although he was charged in October 2020 for obstructing officers attempting to search his van – the charges were later dropped. He continued operating until May 2021. More than 1,000 injections were supervised, and nine overdoses reversed.
“It was the trust people had in Peter, the cup of tea and the Mars bar, that really helped them and is hard to quantify,” said the MSP Paul Sweeney, who became a close friend when the pair volunteered together at the van. “He proved all the naysayers and the procrastinators wrong. He never said it was a silver bullet but Peter knew firsthand the particular risks for people who inject on the street and saw that this intervention could directly save lives.”
Krykant was always insistent that addiction should be understood in the wider context of poverty and inequality, a message he took around the doorsteps of his local Holyrood constituency of Falkirk East when he stood for the Scottish parliament elections in May 2021.
A Guardian film, which followed his campaign, captures his younger son, aglow with pride, explaining to the producers: “I’ve got three reasons you should vote for my dad: because he’s honest, reliable and he listens to people’s suggestions.”
But the responsibility he evidently carried for every individual he helped, the memories they stirred of his own trauma as well as escalating public scrutiny, took their toll and Krykant relapsed.
He had talked openly about darker currents in his childhood in the village of Maddiston, near Falkirk; trauma and sexual abuse that would lead him to start taking drugs when he was 11. He left school with no formal qualifications, and by his late teens he was sleeping rough and injecting heroin.
But eventually he found support to live drug-free, and worked successfully in sales for over a decade, first in Brighton, and later returning north of the border, where he subsequently trained as an addiction support worker. During this time he married and started a family, taking market research work to fit around caring for his two young sons.
Krykant had continued his advocacy work in recent years, passing the van on to the Transform Drug Policy Foundation and embarking on a tour across the UK. Lately he worked at the harm reduction charity Cranstoun, where he developed an overdose response app called BuddyUp and represented the organisation at events around the world.
When the UK’s first legal drug consumption room, the Thistle, opened its doors in Glasgow this January, there were many who drew a direct line from his minibus to its airy vestibule. Others felt his contribution had been sidelined to make way for more mainstream voices, or that his vulnerabilities had been exploited by those who desired the frisson of his lived experience for their campaigns.
This winter, say friends, Krykant found himself at his lowest ebb. His marriage had collapsed, he had lost his job and he was struggling to support himself, worrying about the impact this had on his sons.
Martin Powell, who drove the van on its UK tour, said: “He was the catalyst and without him we might still be waiting. Without question there are people alive today who would not be without Peter Krykant. It’s an absolute tragedy that he isn’t one of them.”
Krykant is survived by his sons.
• Peter Krykant, campaigner, born 13 November 1976; died 9 June 2025
