I NEVER thought I’d see the day where I’d be feeling nostalgic watching a play about hardcore, destructive heroin use. But seeing Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting at the Citizens' Theatre, directed by Gareth Nicoll, took me back to a younger time, post-divorce, when I partied with my pals to the soundtrack of the Trainspotting film, directed by Danny Boyle.

Trainspotting never glamourised heroin use, but it became part of a zeitgeist – and a reference point for lefties building a counter-culture to the greed and narcissism of the Yuppie era.

Trainspotting forced us all to look at the lives of youth who’d been cast on the scrap-heap by Thatcherism. It made everyone care – or forced them to pretend to care – by becoming the book and the film that everyone who was anyone had to read or see.

It provided a grimly entertaining glimpse into the world inhabited by what sociologists back then called the underclass. It was a dark place without hope, the dumping ground for the ruthless disposal of a lost generation, and fertile territory for the merchants of misery who could provide instant, short-term escape from poverty and despair.

In the housing schemes of Scotland, countless thousands of young people succumbed to the lure of the needle, delivering into their bodies and brains a fix of reality-obliterating opium. Trainspotting made "junkies" human and threw the world’s judgments right back at it.

At the end of the play, Renton, played by the fantastic Lorn MacDonald, stands atop a swanky London flat with a stash of cash from a drug deal – stolen from his pals. His intention is to use the drug money to conform to society’s expectations.

“I’ve decided to choose life,” he declares. "Life" as defined by 1980s consumerism. "Life" requiring the exploitation of those underneath him on the social hierarchy. "Life" meaning knuckling under to the tyranny of the free market and becoming one of Thatcher’s children.

Instead of being beaten by Thatcherism, Renton grabs his chance to join it.

When heroin flooded our communities from the early 1980s, decades-old norms were torn asunder. Even the minority of people in working-class communities who were already part of the criminal fraternity had standards – like not stealing from your own. But the overwhelming need to feed all-consuming addiction drove people to break into their neighbours’ houses and mug old people for their pensions.

In 1983, my family returned home to Castlemilk from my wedding reception to find the house broken into – it must have been somebody we knew, somebody who knew the presents were there. I was raging and I can understand communities getting angry when they become frontline victims of those whose lives are devoted to feeding their insatiable addiction.

But when I saw nice people I had gone to school with ending up dead or in jail, I knew that little separated us. I made some poor decisions when I was young, made mistakes – but mine were luckily not so devastating as to end in death or living hell.

But I can easily understand the temptation of heroin-induced oblivion.

Instead of looking at why people would choose to live out of their faces in perpetuity, the UK and US authorities launched the "War on Drugs".

Police and politicians staged high-profile press events, displaying the latest haul they had recovered from futile raids against small-time dealers, while those at the head of the international drugs cartels turned themselves into multi-millionaires.

Pablo Escobar in Colombia acquired 850 palatial houses, and became one of the richest men in the world. In every big city in the UK, drugs gangs amassed bars, night clubs, taxi firms and suntan parlours as legal fronts to launder their illegal fortunes.

Today, about 23 tonnes of heroin floods into the UK every year – and not even a sixth of that is intercepted.

Everybody knows the War on Drugs has failed, yet politicians just keep promising to up the ante. It’s like trying to fend off ballistic missiles with pea shooters.

After Trainspotting, it looked like the momentum was with those who wanted to deal with drugs as a public health problem as opposed to a criminal justice problem. But lately, it seems there is a tacit acceptance that there is a new class in society that first emerged in the 1980s – the "junkies".

They are lazy, feckless wasters who have nobody to blame but themselves for their wretched lives, so the story goes.

In the media and in everyday conversation, "the junkies" are dehumanised and stripped of individual identity. Few folk now empathise with this new underclass who opt out because they’ll never measure up to today’s society’s expectations of success – a definition of success that Trainspotting witheringly takes down.

The vast majority of those addicted to heroin and other downers are escaping from lives whose potential has been sucked out by poverty, hopelessness, abuse and trauma before their baby teeth have fallen out. For them, people who plot out "success" milestones like degrees, careers, houses and pensions live on a different planet. But not many recognise the good fortune that has allowed them to acquire “the leisure wear and matching luggage” described by Mark Renton in Trainspotting.

Many who sneer at addicts are convinced it’s all down to strength of character. It’s time we all sat up and realised that there but for the grace of privilege go us all. And then face up to the fact that the War on Drugs will only be won by unilateral disarmament.

Legalise heroin by making it available on prescription to those addicted. Control the production, distribution and administration. Move control of supply away from the criminal drugs gangs into the hands of qualified health professionals. Then, let us set about creating a country prepared to tackle the social problems that have created a mass market for heroin.

If anaesthetisation is more attractive than choosing life in our country, then it’s our country that needs to change.