On wrong track with drug fight

WHEN the Evening News ran a front page story a few days ago confirming that the number of heroin injectors in Edinburgh had doubled in the last five years, a collective shiver must surely have run up the spine of the Scottish capital.

A doubling in the number of injecting heroin users means that property-related crime in Edinburgh - more than half of which is directly related to heroin addiction - will have increased accordingly.

It will have meant that an even greater number of addicts have ended up selling heroin, or other drugs such as cannabis, to fund their addictions, and this chemical version of pyramid selling will continue to cause an increase in the number of young people in our city coming into contact with heroin.

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It will have meant more gangsters and criminals muscling in on the city’s flourishing heroin trade - with the inevitable upward spiral of violence this will bring in its wake. This too has been well reported on in the News in the last few years.

It will have meant more drug deaths, more overdoses, more overstretched health and social services, and longer queues at chemists as more and more desperate addicts try to contain their craving with heroin substitutes such as methadone.

Predictably, and depressingly, the inevitable platitudes and crocodile tears have been forthcoming from government politicians and professional anti-drug campaigners who don’t have the courage to admit their strategy for dealing with problematic drug use hasn’t so much failed but spontaneously combusted. Again.

There may be those who will say it’s easy to be critical with the benefit of hindsight. But I can put my hand on heart and say, not guilty. True, no one likes a smart Alec who says "I told you this would happen" but, with regards to helping our young people avoid the despair and destruction of heroin addiction, the social stakes are now too high not to look backwards to see who got this wrong - and why.

With uncanny timing, almost exactly five years before this month’s shocking front page story, the Evening News published an article I had written arguing that the latest Government drugs crackdown would do nothing to tackle Scotland’s heroin menace.

Five years later the number of injecting heroin addicts in Edinburgh has doubled. And during those five bleak years friends of mine, like friends of so many others in Scotland, have died from heroin overdoses.

THIS is why I won’t stand by quietly and let politicians shrug their shoulders and dishonestly claim they are on the right track. They are not. They are making it worse. And they know it.

I argued in 1999 that the creation of a Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency was a waste of public money and was part of a failed national drugs strategy that has exacerbated rather than tackled Scotland’s drug problems. Despite PR claims, for the last five years the SDEA has been an expensive white elephant at best, a cosmetic exercise in fooling the public at worst.

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To explain: in no single year since 1999 has the total amount of illegal drugs seized in Scotland been accurately valued at more than 60 million. This is despite the collective efforts of the SDEA, local police forces, Customs and Excise, drug squads and other agencies. To put this into perspective, the cannabis market in the Lothians alone is estimated to be around 50m a year. And that’s just cannabis. In the Lothians. The total illegal drug market in Scotland has been conservatively estimated to be no less than 2 billion a year (excluding the lucrative tobacco and alcohol smuggling operations).

In other words, the law enforcement agencies are taking less than five per cent of the total illegal drugs off the streets of Scotland. This is worth remembering when every relatively insignificant drug bust is wrongly presented as "another success" in the war against drugs.

This should have alarm bells ringing in everyone’s heads. Drug enforcement agencies must be one of the last remaining areas of public spending where taxpayers’ money is thrown at a problem but which gets no results and has little accountability (and I challenge any government politician or senior law enforcement officer to publicly question or debate, in the pages of this newspaper, the accuracy and validity of these statistics).

I also argued in 1999 that the heroin problem would get worse unless cannabis was removed from the black market. This sensible policy, such as they have enacted in Holland with their coffee shop system, would help drive a wedge between use of the two drugs. Addicts often sell cannabis to fund their addictions, the two cultures overlap, and therefore more young people have crossed over from smoking cannabis to smoking heroin off the foil. The Evening News story last week confirmed what most drug workers always feared would happen. Many of those who occasionally smoked heroin have ended up addicted, and have then moved on to inject because less heroin is wasted that way and the hit is stronger.

But regardless of the damage heroin is doing to our communities, the politicians continue to leave the huge black market in cannabis in the hands of violent criminals at the top, as well as many heroin addicts at street level, thereby exposing more young people to heroin, as well as wasting police time and public money in what has become nothing more than a cosmetic exercise in law and order posturing.

THE scale of opiate addiction in Scotland is nothing short of a national emergency and should be treated as such. Last year, official statistics recorded 380 drug deaths in Scotland. This has surpassed one drug death per day in Scotland for the first time ever. This figure too has almost doubled since the 200 Scottish drug deaths per year I quoted in that 1999 article.

I argued that in order to break the cycle of crime, overdosing and degrading destructive lifestyles we should enact emergency measures to get heroin addicts into treatment. We should be providing clean needles, an effective network of rehab and counselling services, and prescribe pharmaceutical heroin to all registered addicts. This would not only collapse the black market in heroin but it would also help stabilise both the lives of addicts as well as our heroin-ravaged communities.

But for Scotland’s Deputy Justice Minister, Hugh Henry, the problem is merely "troubling". Complacently, the policymakers fiddle while our communities burn. Two years ago, the Home Office announced it would allow trials in six test areas for the use of prescribing free pharmaceutical heroin to addicts. But the Scottish Executive blocked its implementation in Scotland. What’s going on in their heads?

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Why is it that when it’s crystal clear that our national drug strategy has been a disastrous failure that the Scottish Executive have taken Samuel Beckett’s old maxim of "fail again, fail better" and made it their guiding principle?

I can only conclude, again, that if Hugh Henry and his parliamentary colleagues are left in charge of our failed strategy to tackle drug abuse then God knows what kind of a mess we’ll be looking at in another five years’ time.

• Kevin Williamson is SSP drugs spokesperson and the author of Drugs and the Party Line

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