Where there’s a will there’s a way.

The statements this week from the Scottish Government’s minister for drugs and the Crown Office are a welcome sign that there is some change around how we look at drug use and drug deaths.

Even from some MSPs on the Conservatives side there appeared to be a willingness to consider trying something new.

One of the ways that we can help people who use drugs and try to reduce fatal overdose is a safer drug consumption room, or as Peter Krykant termed his operation, in Glasgow city centre, an Overdose Prevention Centre.

READ MORE: Drug consumption room in Glasgow moves closer with new plan to be submitted

I prefer Peter’s terminology but the name is less important than the impact it can have.

We should have had an official facility in Glasgow by now, but we don’t because there was not suffiecient will among the people upon whose support or approval was needed.

The UK Home Office took a ‘just say no’ attitude to a more human, public health approach, that could have saved lives.

They were, and still are, more interested in posturing in front of Home Counties law and order types who wouldn’t know someone with a drug problem if they jumped out of a jam jar at the village fete.

The previous Lord Advocate said it needed a change in the law and he couldn’t sanction one, or give the legal guarantees needed by staff and service users, without it.

READ MORE:'Appalling' almost 190 suspected drug deaths Glasgow in six months

A drug consumption/overdose prevention facility won’t tackle the drug death scandal on its own or do it immediately.

But it will help keep people alive and provide a better chance of engaging people, when they are ready, to the services that can really start to make a difference.

Peter Krykant’s facility alone, prevented several fatal overdoses and without that limited service the drug death numbers in Glasgow would have been even higher.

The Scottish Parliament heard from MSP Paul Sweeney, who often volunteered with Peter, that one 21 year-old woman overdosed three times in front of Peter.

Had she been in one of her usual injecting spots, there is a high likelihood she would have died.

This week, the Crown Office said it was “contributing appropriately to the development of proposals for a SDCF to operate within current legal frameworks”.

That looks like a change in attitude towards what is possible.

Not waiting for a change at the UK level, that is not going to happen under the current party in government, but accepting there is a problem, there is something that can contribute to a solution, so let’s see how we can make it happen.

We need more, however. We need more treatment services and more treatment options.

It must be recognised that what works for one person will not necessarily work for another.

It must also be recognised that if someone needs treatment they should be able to expect that it is available to them, just like with any other serious, life threatening, health condition.

The Scottish Government has finally, after years of negligence and making funding decisions that exacerbated the problem, committed to extra resources.

How it is spent, is the crucial point.

Investing money in the wrong way will not lead to results, no matter how good the intentions are.

This month we also had the resignation of the leadership of the Drug Death Task Force.

With the numbers of people dying from drug related deaths continuing to rise, it is hard to see that the Drug Death Task force achieved anything.

And the fact that the leadership did not understand that actions had to be speeded up showed a lack of understanding that people are dying, have been dying, in their thousands, while they pore over figures and study, and write even more, reports.

If there is one upside of Scotland’s long term drug problem, it is that there exists a large community of people who have the sort of lived experience that the rest of us can only be grateful that we do not.

People who have been to the depths and survived, but not only that, learned about their condition, what triggers it, what can contain it and crucially how they can support others going through the same and prevent others reaching that point.

They too have done the research, have the qualifications, understand the theories and have shelves with the heavy books to consult. Some of them wrote or helped to write them.

Peter Krykant is just one of them, who has had a higher profile because of the visibility of the service he ran for a time in the city centre.

There are many, many more, in the recovery community who have proposed solutions but have been ignored, while the work they do on a daily basis is keeping people alive against the odds.

Again without them, the drug deaths total would undoubtedly be higher.

But they are not being utilised by the official services, in some cases it would be fair to say they are being deliberately excluded when they should be at the heart of the solution.

If we are to have a real united approach to this, we need to end the elitist attitude that has been hampering efforts to stop our people dying.