many are still addicted, living in with lung and liver disease. If T2 is good.. but this is real life
the city. Edinburgh was dubbed the Aids capital of Europe after Robertson helped to publish a British Medical Journal report in February 1987 suggesting the crisis was being caused by users sharing injecting equipment.
He added: “It sparked a furore. Everybody from government people to Playboy magazine turned up at Muirhouse surgery.
“About 50 TV companies arrived over the next few months.
“I regret drawing so much attention to our community. Edinburgh got the tag ‘Aids capital of Europe’. That was unfair because there were lots of other places.
“The problem for Muirhouse was we had identified the problem and were first to publish an article in the British Medical Journal.
“Looking back, it was a very scary time. There was a plague-like feel to it. We had kids dying from Aids.
“I had teenagers who had all left school together coming through the door jaundiced and with needle wounds asking for help.
“When I asked them what drug they were taking, they said they were on ‘smack’. I asked them if they meant heroin and they said, ‘ No, smack.’
“We had a whole wave of deaths in the first few years – 16, 17 and 18-year- olds, who had hardly any experience of drugs at all, taking a shot of the very strong heroin there was at the time and dying. “I remember being in the city mortuary a lot identifying people who had been found in flats dead on their own.
“No one liked drug users. The police didn’t show much of an interest. The pathology people at the time just put it down as another drug overdose.
“But it was tragic, devastating for families. There’s a house near our surgery where three people in one family overdosed and died.
“There are houses all over the place where there’s been several fatalities.
“I can drive around this area and there are all sorts of places that evoke bad memories.”
Robertson said the city was gripped by panic when the HIV epidemic was discovered and addicts started dying.
Doctors were worried about treating patients. He added: “It started off with young people coming in with hepatitis and abscesses and sores on their arms.
“We had people having overdoses and sudden deaths.
“The apocalypse bit came later with the HIV epidemic, which we didn’t discover until 1985. And that was when things got really very ry dark. We had an epidemic.
“At the beginning, people didn’tdid dn’t know how it was spread.
“Like everyone, of course,, I wasw worried treating patients. TThe police were worried and the localloc cal authorities were worried. Peopleop ple wouldn’t sit next to people on n the bus because they thought t they might catch it from a drug user.
“It’s hard to get your head around that now butt anxiety was huge.”
But Rober tson thinks ks s Trainspotting was a turning ng g point in how heroin users rs were viewed.
He said: “I think we owewe Irvine Welsh a great debt bt because he brought it out ut in the open. He definitelyly humanised drug users.
“You would be completely ly insensitive to not haveve some recognition of thesese characters.”