Drugs crisis has fallen off the radar for politicians

THE insularity of the 2015 election has been marked. It is concentrating on a very narrow field of subjects and the areas that have been left out are mentioned by commentators but still fail to find any traction in the campaigns.

It seems, like in Scotland last year, and earlier, that the UK is now seeing every issue through the constitutional prism, and the issues that are hard to see through that prism just do not get seen. As far as election issues go, defence, and foreign policy (with the exception of foreign aid) have barely raised their heads.

Another one is drugs, but it is difficult to see why this scourge is no longer a live political issue.

A more equitable society that protects the vulnerable, and the economy, have been by far the biggest battlegrounds the political parties have picked.

According to the Scottish Government, drug misuse costs the country £3.5 billion a year. That is not an unsubstantial sum even for government. It is three times the saving Police Scotland is expected to make.

Now it is revealed that an analysis of drug deaths in 2013 by the NHS Information Services Division showed that 76 per cent of those who died were male and half lived in the most deprived areas of Scotland.

It also says that almost twothirds of those analysed in the figures had a psychiatric condition recorded in the six months before they died.

So the people drugs are killing are on the whole people in deprived areas, and sick people (although that may be caused by drug use), but more importantly they are people in the system.

And those figures about deaths, tragic though they are, do not reflect the horror and misery the drugs and subsequent downfalls bring to countless others: wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, brothers and friends.

Perhaps the view is that drugs, which were a headline problem back in the day but which have now largely dropped off the political agenda, are a problem that is going away. Yes, drug deaths are going down, thankfully, but it is worth remembering that the number is still about 50 per cent higher than ten years ago.

Maybe the difficulty is a practical one, and the problem is just very hard to tackle. That is almost certainly true but what that must mean is that anything – and everything – that can be done to tackle it is done.

The most recent figures show new “legal highs” are responsible for a growing number of drugs deaths.

The Scottish Government set up an expert review group as to what legal measures could be taken in the fight against legal highs, and that group reported earlier this year.

Hopefully the government will look at the success of measures in Ireland to tackle just this problem and take similar action. Slowness of government to act allows the criminal gangs that peddle misery better chances at evasion.