Why must we tiptoe around this blight?

JUNKIES – sorry, the ‘substance addicted’ – are to be treated as though they are ill and not criminals, so is the lane behind the Mail’s Glasgow office now an al fresco hospital?

I regularly see ‘patients’ on its one long ward surreptitiously doing drug – sorry, medicine – deals and selfmedicating by injecting.

By mistake I stumbled across Nationalist Joan McAlpine having a spat with a Labour type about the substance addicted on Holyrood TV.

I knew he was Labour by his red tie and he was miffed that Joan, a South Scotland List MSP rarely spotted west of the Cree, had mentioned ‘the Trainspotting generation’.

The substance addicted, he said, are not chaotic types but are ‘just like you and me’.

Really? They schlep to work, struggle to pay the bills and taxes, do they?

And that fine citizen who, out of his mind on something, menacingly demanded ‘Gie me two pounds’ in the heart of our biggest city the other Sunday was doing a little charity collecting?

MSPs bickering about the nomenclature for such people view this problem through the wrong end of the telescope.

Yes, every junkie is someone’s son or daughter but we should not be so cowed by PC niceties that we cannot say they blight society and are nothing like the rest of us.