Chemist Ingle was Scottish drug gang’s version of Walter White
Designer ‘legal high’ tablets created to evade the law
THE QUACK chemist who masterminded production at Scotland’s biggest homegrown drugs factory developed his own designer pills in a bid to sidestep new laws. Harry Ingle was recruited to a drugs gang by Scots bosses Eric Reid, 45, and Scott McGaw, 33, to play a similar role to that of Breaking Bad character Walter White, making use of his scientific knowledge of drugs. When police bust the major operation in Paisley last year, it was the first industrial seizure of nitrazolam – a benzodiazepine very similar to the etizolam pills that had flooded Scottish streets. The raid in March 2017, resulted in the seizure of 330,000 nitrazolam tablets and 1.6million etizolam, batched in buckets and holdalls, with more being churned out from a pill machine at the rate of 250,000 per hour. At Ingle’s rented Paisley home, police found sheets of paper with complex chemical formulae written down. During his trial, video was shown of Ingle snorting lines of powder and saying he was isolated and alone in Scotland. A source told the Record: “Ingle was an employee and was lower in the hierarchy despite having all the drugs know-how. It is likely he researched the formula on nitrazolam before 2016, when new compounds could evade the law as legal highs.”
The Psychoactive Substances Act launched in May 2016, meaning a blanket ban for these drugs.
And, owing to the massive amount of Ingle’s nitrazolam on the streets, police had convinced the Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to specifically introduce the drug into the Misuse of Drugs Act a year later. This doubled the maximum sentence for dealers to 14 years. Police confirmed the Paisley gang had been the ones to introduce nitrazolam to Scottish streets. A spokesman said: “The nitrazolam seized at Back Sneddon Street was not the first time Police Scotland had encountered the substance. “However it was the first time we had seen it being produced and seized at any significant level. “Nitrazolam was known as a ‘research chemical’ or a ‘designer benzodiazepine’ and was available legally until the introduction of the Psychoactive Substance Act 2016. “It was thereafter controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 along with many other ‘designer benzodiazepines’.”