NICOLA Sturgeon’s public health minister faces a vote of no confidence in Holyrood after Labour and the Lib Dems criticised his leadership of plans to combat Scotland’s drug death crisis. Joe FitzPatrick has been under pressure after the National Records of Scotland revealed that 1,264 people had died drug-related deaths in Scotland in 2019, up 6% on the previous year. Nearly seven in 10 of those who died last year were male and more than two-thirds were aged 35 – 54. According to the NRS, Scotland’s drug-death rate was higher than those reported for all the EU countries and was approximately three and a half times that of the UK as a whole.