Get real now and save some lives

SCOTLAND is sinking deeper into a drugs problem with no signs the addiction can be broken.

The figures are grim. This small country has a drug-death rate twice as high as England.

The toll of fake Valium, known as the blue plague, has doubled in a year.

Nearly 1000 Scots, some of them children, are dead. All from drugs in a single year. That rate has doubled in a decade and is the worst on record.

Across Europe, Scotland languishes with such a dreadful image.

No one has managed to turn this around. Campaigns, charities, government initiatives, police crackdowns. Nothing.

The next long-awaited official strategy is due to be announced but for the communities blighted by drugs, it’s hard to see how it will work.

What is clear, however, is that the “war on drugs” hasn’t worked.

There must now be a radical and honest appraisal – and it has to be done across all fronts at speed.

Whatever it is we’re doing, it’s not enough.

While drug dealers are flooding the streets, the Government should be flooding support groups, schools and health projects with money.

Arresting everyone is as impossible as it is pointless. Police can target the gangsters but they can’t stop every teenager with a cheap pill.

Scotland has no choice but to wake up to this horrendous reality – and confront it head on.