‘People are dropping like flies here... they don’t mean to die

The toll of long-term drug abuse is reflected in the drug death figures among the so-called Trainspotting generation, and it’s particularly prominent in Dundee.

The city, where more than 3,000 families are significantly affected by hard drug use, has seen more than 400 people die from drugs over the past decade, and the situation has been described as a public health emergency.

People from all walks of life can become hooked as a form of “escapism”. But there tends to be a close correlation between drug/alcohol abuse with poverty, unemployment, stigma and lack of opportunity.

As addicts get older the long-term consequences also tend to be more pronounced.

Addiction issues can also span families and generations.

Taking a heart-breaking tour among the graves of Birkhill Cemetery, Dundee woman Jamie explained how drugs have been directly responsible for the death of more than 20 people among her close relatives and friends, including her sister, mum, dad, step dad and uncles.

Some have gravestones, but others are buried in the unmarked and relatively unkempt paupers’ funeral area.

“When I come down here it’s like a family reunion,” she said. “People are dropping like flies here. They don’t mean to die. It’s an epidemic. Whole families are being wiped out.”

The statistics are certainly stark. Drugs cost Scotland £3.5 billion per year and 70% of all crime is connected to drugs.

But the human cost is also devastating. In 2017 alone, 79 Dundee children lost parents to drugs.

There are also parents in Dundee who fear every day that they are going to lose their child to this “epidemic”.

Carol recalled how she was assaulted by her 27-year-old daughter Kelsey in Dundee city centre while she was high on heroin.

Kelsey first took drugs at her aunt’s 40th birthday party around the time her father died of a heroin related heart-attack. But there’s the heartbreaking revelation that, when they next met up, Kelsey had no recollection of causing her mother’s injuries.

Meanwhile, Lochee publican Karen Beattie gives an insight into being a victim of drug crime.

Her 44-year-old brother Robin was fatally stabbed by a heroin user in 2011. “As much as you try to move on, it never gets easier,” she said.

According to Neil McKeganey, the founding director of the Centre for Drug Misuse Research at Glasgow University, if a jumbo jet dropped out of the sky and killed 400 people with the regularity of drug deaths, there would be an “absolute commitment” by government to address the problem.

However, when it comes to Dundee being Europe’s drug death capital, he thinks that “in some way there has been a greater failure in the part of services in Dundee than anywhere else”.

He said: “Cynical as it sounds, the people who are actually paid to respond to the drug problem – ultimately they don’t have that investment because they don’t actually live with this problem.

“They conjure up initiatives, locate them in communities like this and then walk away from them. The people who know best are in the communities which this drug problem has destroyed. These are the people who have a true investment in trying to find an answer to this problem.”

Controversially, Dr McKeganey questions the “overprescription” of the heroin substitute methadone. He goes against the grain by claiming “harmprevention” methods have created a generation of addicts who are not much better off on methadone than they were on heroin.

But other academics have argued that cutting opiate replacement therapies like methadone and buprenorphine would lead to many more deaths from heroin abuse than we see today.

In some way there has been a greater failure in the part of services in Dundee than anywhere else. NEIL McKEGANEY