Japan has the answer to Scotland’s drugs crisis

As a Scot, I found the news that my country had registered, by some distance, the most drug-related deaths in Europe last year profoundly depressing. But my sprits sank even lower when I saw the reaction. Rather than provoking a genuine debate about how to tackle this crisis, the dismal statistics merely set off yet another round of the Holyrood vs Westminster blame game. There were wearily predictable calls for more money, more treatment programmes, more ‘consumption rooms’, more methadone, and even, for those under the illusion that it isn’t virtually the de facto situation anyway, legalisation.

It seems to be accepted as a fact now that a significant number of Scottish people will become dependent on drugs, that drug abusers, like the poor, will always be with us. The only question worth discussing is how to help such people cope with their habit, and hopefully, in time, beat it. The whole idea of preventing drugs taking hold of lives in the first place seem to have been either forgotten, or abandoned as a lost cause. But