NEIL McKEGANEY

It is a strange aspect of our drug problem that it induces a kind of selective amnesia in which the past and the future are obscured in an overwhelming focus on the present. We think of Scotland's heroin problem, rather like the rain, as always having been there and as likely to continue much as it is now well into the future. The reality, though, may be very different.

In 1968 the Scottish Home and Health Department produced a report which proudly announced that "Scotland does not have a problem of drug misuse comparable to that in London and the Home Counties". At the time that report was written the numbers of heroin addicts in treatment in Scotland could be counted in double figures. Fast forward 40 years and we find ourselves treating some 13,000 addicts each year and estimating the number of addicts in the tens of thousands.

Scotland's heroin problem took off in the late eighties and in little more than 20 years has accelerated to twice the rate of the heroin problem in England. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Scotland now has the highest rate of heroin addiction anywhere in Europe. When you see something moving that fast you had better ask where it is heading.

In the case of our drug problem, the answer to that question is pretty chilling. I recently attended a conference in Scotland that drew a wide range of professionals working in the drugs field as well as parents of children who had paid for their heroin addiction with their lives. The parents gathered in small quiet groups, sharing the pain of a family life that had been shattered. These were broken lives full of regret, anger and bereavement. The sense of loss which these parents felt was matched only by their sense of anger at what they saw as the lack of urgency on the part of those whose job it was to deal with Scotland's drug problem. Over the years they had watched as an entire industry of drug professionals had grown up. And yet when it mattered, these parents still found themselves coping on their own. As one mother put it to me: "What do all these people do? Because they are nae helping us." These mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers are the collateral damage of our drug problem.

At the other end of the age spectrum there are about 50,000 children in Scotland with a parent addicted to illegal drugs. When you add that figure to the number of children who have a brother or sister with a drug problem, or an aunt or an uncle, you realise that the numbers of people whose lives have been affected can be counted not in the tens of thousands but in the hundreds of thousands. Recent research has shown that children growing up with a drug user in their family are some seven times more likely to start to use illegal drugs themselves. Once drug abuse has entered the family it acquires a momentum of its own.

We also have around 300 addicts dying each year in Scotland. Drug addiction, though, is a problem that, while taking away with one hand, gives richly with another. There are millions of pounds being made each year from the trade in illegal drugs in Scotland. The money from that trade often leaves Scotland to pass through banking systems in other countries before returning as legitimate investments in legal companies within Scotland. As this sequence unfolds we face the real prospect of being unable to distinguish between the legal and the illegal economy, so closely will the two have become entwined. At that point the trade in illegal drugs will have won respectability and more of us than we realise will be working to expand its profits.

What, you might ask, comes after the super-successful economics of the drugs trade? And the answer is politics. In the recent trial of one of the UK's major crime figures, Terry Adams, the court was provided with the transcripts of conversations from Adams's home and offices. Adams spoke of five-figure donations to political parties. In much the same way as others donate money to political parties, our top-level criminals will also be seeking to secure some level of political influence.

In the event that our drug problem were to expand much beyond its current level you would see needles and syringes and other drug-related paraphernalia much more frequently. The sight of individuals using illegal drugs in public places, and suffering the effects of their drug use, would be much more common. Drug-related crime, already widespread, would become even more so. And the drugs trade itself would have spread its influence into legally constituted companies.

In time we may come to realise that drug abuse threatens our society to a degree greater even than international terrorism. In time the two questions we may come to ask with increasingly frequency may be: how much drug abuse can our society contain? And what are we prepared to do to reduce its effects? John Grieve, one of the UK's most respected police officers, has commented that if the drug problem continues advancing as it is at the moment, we're "going to be faced with some frightening options. Either you have a massive reduction in civil rights or you have to look at some radical solutions". With a heroin problem unequalled anywhere in Europe, Scotland may face those options before anybody else.

  • Neil McKeganey is professor of drug misuse research at Glasgow University.