The Scottish heroin epidemic started in Edinburgh, the more prosperous of Scotland's two largest cities. This was largely due to the presence of MacFarlan Smith, which was at one point the world's largest producer of pharmaceutical opiates. That initial cohort of heroin users in the 1980s predominantly used drugs that were diverted from the legitimate pharmaceutical supply rather than smuggled from abroad, which led to an unusually rapid increase in the user population and the illicit market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacFarlan_Smith

The majority of overdose deaths in Scotland involved multiple drugs; for reasons that are not entirely clear, Scottish addicts are particularly prone to concurrently use opiates, benzodiazepines and alcohol in an indiscriminate manner. This vastly increases the risk of overdose due to the cumulative and unpredictable respiratory depression induced by multiple drugs.

http://www.sdf.org.uk/934-deaths-from-a-drug-overdose-in-sco...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_effect

I can strongly recommend Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari a personal account of a deprived childhood on the outskirts of Glasgow.

Edit: Something I find grimly fascinating is the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) and its interactive map visualisation:

https://simd.scot

This something that the pro-independence Scottish government are making quite a bit of noise about now; some of it is probably opportunism, but Scotland's drug culture is different enough that it certainly seems to require different tools. In particular, there is pressure among some people for the introduction of safe drug consumption facilities, with the idea being that this keeps people off the street, with access to medical care, in the system, and with support to help them recover. These are currently prohibited in the UK.

We'll see what happens over the next few years, of course. The current UK government is unlikely to be giving any concessions.

Yet each election term they voted in either the same politicians or politicians with the same manifestos.

Nothing will change!

For people outside the UK, I'd recommend tracking down a BBC documentary called The Scheme. It's quite old now (~2010) but still pretty relevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scheme

The first spike in deaths for Estonia seems to happen after the 2008 financial crisis, but I'm surprised to see that the dfinancial crisis hit Estonia harder than the US?

What other facts give Estonia a surprisingly high mortality rate from opiates?

The Scottish Government is at least trying to address the problems with some degree of success and a certain amount of innovation, which the posts on the above blog often feature. However there is clearly a long way to go.

Off topic. So I thought the "sick man of Europe" was used exclusively to describe the Ottoman Empire and dig into this and turns out there has been multiple countries in different eras called the "sick man of Europe". Read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_man_of_Europe

> Scotland has been called "sick man of Europe" several times, but for health reasons instead of economic.[26]

For anyone else wondering "Geographic Access" is based on public transport times to selected public services. This is outline in the methodology documentation [0].

[0] https://www2.gov.scot/simdpublictransport

Fingertips also provide a range of useful information: https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/

As a cost-saving measure due to Westminster-imposed spending cuts, the Scottish government merged all six regional Scottish police forces into a single force, Police Scotland, in 2013.

This involved a game of musical chairs at senior rank as posts were merged, so the senior officers with the best resumes (most people working for them, biggest budgets) ended up getting the plum jobs. In practice, this meant that Police Scotland lost its distinctive regional specialities and became dominated by senior cops from the former Strathclyde police force (i.e. Glasgow). This force was culturally presbyterian and prone to a puritanical zero-tolerance culture, which they exported to the rest of the nation, damaging local initiatives such as Edinburgh's unofficially sanctioned brothels (attacks on sex workers spiked) and setting relations with the LGBT community back by a decade. They also clamped down on tolerance of cannabis, which didn't help, and were notoriously unsupportive of harm reduction initiatives such as shooting galleries.

Police Scotland seems to be improving these days as they re-learn a lot of hard-won lessons about how to do policing in places that aren't the west end of Glasgow, but the combination of an intolerant, harsh policing culture and Theresa May's Home Office calling the shots on drugs was utterly toxic.

In a country that has for many years only had a broadly two-party system, there was little effect to be had by voting for someone else. And given Glasgow's historical politics, that was always going to be the lefty party.

Things have changed, though. The devolved Scottish Parliament has now been in operation for 20 years; in Westminster, Glasgow North-East (which is the parliamentary constituency covering Springburn) was in 2015 one of the constituencies that saw its vote swing massively behind the pro-Scottish-independence party that was traditionally unpopular in UK-wide elections, though they narrowly lost that seat in the unexpected 2017 election.

And this is the reason it is important – drugs policy is reserved to the UK government, and there's a fair bit of chat about it now.

I see the drug problem in described first hand, I live in Glasgow city center and if our tenement flat door is opened at night in the morning I will be stepping over users and needles on the stairs.

However things are changing, the SNP are pushing for drug consumption rooms, currently being blocked by the UK GOV, but they are under increased pressure and will either buckle or independence will make it a non issue, as well as general city wide improvements, better policing + rehabilitation, reducing of shorter sentences etc.

Made a change to have an MP who had done a non political job for 20 years plus before becoming an MP.

There is a large cross-section of the population that vote for Labour irregardless of, well, anything.

Generations have voted for Labour because their parents, grandparents and great great grandparents did, and because they believe Labour stands for working class people and values - all the while without once considering what their policies or values actually are, or indeed those of the opposing parties.

This cross-section also firmly believes the Conservatives are 'rich toffs' trying to screw over the working classes, and the Liberal Democrats are 'liberal lefties' (and of course we can't have that!)

Will the dogma ever end? The tabloid press, and indeed sometimes Labour politicians, continue their poisonous to stoking of the flames, and people just nod their heads.

Politics in the UK really is a terrible mess.