Michael Fry: Past approach to drugs a policy to ponder

Through film and story, Edinburgh has come to be recognised round the world as one of the modern cities that has a bit too much of a drugs problem.

It is not just a matter of film and story either. Dazed junkies can readily be seen wandering back and forth along a main road leading west out of the city, where they come to a chemist's to get their legal fixes – almost next door to a Festival venue too. The tourists may not notice and none of the locals talks about it, though they all know about it: I know because my own home is nearby.

The anecdotal evidence is confirmed by the statistical facts. Edinburgh does have a drugs problem which has not been cured by all the attention and resources devoted to it – if anything the reverse. According to the General Register Office, drug-related deaths in Lothian have risen by a quarter since 2007. There is one such death every four days.

Over 80 per cent of victims are men, with the biggest increase among men aged over 35. Long-term users of heroin, the sort of people Irvine Welsh grew up with, are dying their predictably premature deaths – those who inspired Trainspotting are fast running out of time.

It would be nice if modern cities never had these problems: there would not be the suffering and degradation, and we would not have to squander the public money we are so short of on helping people unable or unwilling to help themselves. Perhaps we might hammer them and force them to. Or perhaps in Edinburgh, once a city of massive securities in property and class, we might look back to an earlier era, to see how they dealt with the problems then and where we have gone wrong.

Yet if we went back to the Edinburgh of 100 years ago, we would find heroin freely, or almost freely, on sale. It could no longer be sold, as it once had been, from any old corner shop but only from a registered chemist's. There was no other restriction. People often took it for toothache.

Excepting only Amsterdam – still in a class of its own today – Edinburgh probably has more experience of drugs than any other city in the western world. Pure opium had arrived here by 1693, when it figured (along with cannabis) in the first Scottish pharmacopeia, or printed catalogue of drugs and their medical applications.

The medical pre-eminence of Edinburgh for a century and more after the Enlightenment positioned the city at the outermost cutting edge of discovery and research on new drugs.

One of the professors at the university, Sir Robert Christison, brought cocaine back from South America. While staying at Balmoral, he gave some to Queen Victoria and to a rising young politician called Winston Churchill.

Drugs had already spread down the social scale too, if in a way hardly to be defined as recreational. Amid the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, reported a sheriff in Glasgow, 'mothers, when they go to the mills, are in the habit of giving opium and gin to their sucking infants, to keep them quiet.'

In genteel Edinburgh, however, opium became more of a bourgeois preference and indeed, according to a medical journal, was 'regularly put on the table on the removal of the cloth after dinner'. How fitting indeed it is that Thomas de Quincey, friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge and author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, should lie buried in St Cuthbert's churchyard in the shadows of Edinburgh Castle.

Heroin, the most powerful opiate, was first synthesised in 1874. The pharmaceutical manufacturers which had grown up round Edinburgh's medical powerhouse were soon making it. By the end of the nineteenth century the city had become the biggest producer of this and other opiate drugs in the world.

Output continues to the present day – as in the Macfarlan Smith factory at Gorgie which, at the hand of Ian Rankin, formed the deadly backdrop to a case solved by Inspector John Rebus.

In sum we can conclude that Edinburgh has experienced an almost unique familiarity with drugs that stretches back over three centuries. How can it be that, for the first two centuries, drugs seemed to be no special matter of public concern? Of course the tendency to harmful addiction in certain users was noted. Yet, according to Christison, 'the habit is easily broken, and there is no danger in suddenly breaking it' - cold turkey treatment, in other words.

By contrast now, after the third century, the subject of drugs often arouses hysteria in the Conservative and Labour parties and in wide swathes of the media. At the national level, an immense political apparatus for the repression of drug use has been set up in recent decades. It can spend an awful lot of time arguing furiously with itself over the precise risk posed by this substance or that, yet overall it fails to stop anybody using drugs who really wants to. Which centuries got the balance of policy right – those first two centuries or our century?

The question was raised in his own way this week by Sir Ian Gilmore, the retiring president of the Royal College of Physicians in England, who called for the laws to 'be reconsidered with a view to decriminalising illicit drug use'.

Advancing like Daniel into the den of the Sun newspaper, Sir Ian added in an article there that 'there will always be hard drug users but instead of treating them as criminals we should treat them as patients... Heroin addiction is an illness and we should treat it as such, instead of acting on a knee-jerk reaction and putting people in prison.' On this issue, as on so much else, the history of Edinburgh can be instructive.