I was a drugs squad officer – this is how we tackle Scotland's drug deaths

Scotland’s annual drug deaths total amounts amount to four Lockerbie atrocities every year. A sobering thought. And it is police officers who have to take the mums, dads, sisters brothers of those 1172 drug death victims to local mortuaries and pull back the sheet for that heart-breaking final duty. Identification.

But this is the tip of the iceberg.

The damage our outdated prohibition laws cause in our communities is immense, pervading every aspect of daily life. It doesn’t have to be this way. I spent a career enforcing these laws, and was considered successful. I now know for a fact that every arrest or seizure only fuelled the fire of crime, violence and competition in this marketplace that we have created.

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As a leading Police Scotland officer, Assistant Chief Constable Gary Ritchie, said recently: “We can’t arrest our way out of the drugs problem.”

These are obvious facts: prohibition fuels traffickers, gangs, crime, violence and unregulated drugs with unknown purity and content on to our streets. And for everyone of those preventable drug deaths some copper has to take mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers and have them do the unthinkable: identify their dead loved ones on a cold mortuary slab. This is what our policy of prohibition and useless slogans such as “just say no” have led to over the last 53 years. Surely it’s time to stop and think. To talk.

I’m so tired of listening to people with no knowledge or experience tell us what is needed and not needed. Get out of the way. Forget your politics and ideologies for once and allow us an adult, evidence-led discussion.

Because only then can we begin to make the changes required to have an impact on this national disgrace and create a workable, sensible fact-based policy. We owe this to the generations to come.

The more money governments grudgingly put back into creating schemes and programmes to help addicts beat drugs, the more vested interests they create – those who draw that money down and create livelihoods and careers out of the never-ending misery.

It’s time to try another approach: to decriminalise users and regulate all of these drugs properly, thereby taking the control away from the cartels and crime gangs which are currently making fortunes out of the market we support. In these days when so many new man-made products are becoming available on the black market, isn’t it even more important that we know what’s available,and in what quantity and potency? It’s even more important that we control the product.

We could take this lucrative tax-free market away from the very worst individuals and gangs among us. Regulation isn’t the soft option. It’s the tough option, because we cut out the gangsters, moneylenders and mobsters at source. We take away their vast profits and funds.

When we have such a valuable street commodity there will always be people fighting to control it. Violence and death always increases under prohibitions. When there are problems with supply, such as now when the Taliban clamp down, the market simply adjusts to accommodate and prices fluctuate.

Crucially, so does potency and content and we see new man-made products and replacement or corrupted substances enter the market. No-one is going without their substance of choice or a replacement, and we have no say at all in any of this. None.

(Image: PA)

Because of prohibition there is no downside for organised crime. It’s time to remove the rhetoric, put aside ideologies and party loyalties and address the corruption that keeps the status quo in place. This is too important for politics. We need an adult, evidence-led debate or Royal Commission, where we can decide a way forward that will offer Scotland hope.

We are on the wrong path, and have been since Nixon declared this senseless war on minorities in 1971. It’s also time we started wakening up to reality, and catching up with the rest of the world. It’s time for change.

Simon McLean is a former serious crime and drugs squad officer as well as an undercover operative and trainer with the NCIU. He is now a spokesman for LEAP UK (Law Enforcement Action Partnership) and LEAP Scotland and a podcaster alongside former deputy chief constable Tom Wood – shows.acast.com/crime-time-inc – and, like Wood – a successful author. Crucially he is also a father and grandfather.

Next time, why the solution is right in front of us if we move politics aside – with our prosecution service.