‘WHY on Earth do we not have the wit, the honesty to admit that the policies and enforcement techniques that we have been deploying for the

last 35 years are failing? We are not winning the war on drugs. We have to stop telling ourselves fairy tales about the success of anti-drugs initiatives when the ruins of past initiatives are mocking us from the funeral parlours of Glasgow.”

These words could have been written last week. They were, in fact, written in February 2000 by Scotland’s leading judge, Lord McCluskey, in response to the news that there had been a 23% increase in drugs deaths the previous year. In total, 340 were killed by drugs in that final year of the 20th century.

Flip the calendar forward two decades and the figure stands at 1187. The failure described by Lord McCluskey has been multiplied three-and-a-half times over.

Had that number have been killed in a fire in a nightclub, or a crush at a football stadium, the entire nation would now be paralysed with shock and grief. But the people whose bodies are discovered in the hidden corners of the poorest parts of Glasgow and Dundee are the faceless flotsam and jetsam of our society. We rarely see newspaper photographs of these victims as smiling children when they still had hopes and dreams of a decent life.

Back in these early days of the new millennium, Tony Blair went to the G8 summit of international leaders and declared his intention to lead a global war on the drugs trade. At home, he appointed a “drugs tsar” and expanded the Metropolitan Police’s “Rat on a Rat” campaign encouraging the public to report drug dealers. He then came to Scotland to support the Daily Record’s plan for a name-and-shame register of drug dealers and said: “We want Britain to be the hardest place in the world to be a drug dealer.”

I remind people of that, not to make any partisan political point but to underline just how dismally ineffective public drugs policies have been over these past decades. And if all we get now in response to these new figures is a little bit of tweaking here and there, we will come back in 2040 to lament yet another lost generation.

Over the past week, there have been many thousands of words written about Scotland’s drug crisis, some of them sensible, some of them worthless. I just want to add a few more observations, hopefully on the sensible side, based not on news reports but on almost daily contact with people who have addiction problems at the severe end of the spectrum. And the first point I want to make is that there is – and no pun intended here – no quick fix. This is a problem that is entrenched in parts of our society and is fundamentally linked to poverty and trauma.

Our society is judgmental towards “junkies”. We see them on the streets begging and give them a wide berth. Up close, however, these are real people with truly tragic lives.

Heroin addicts – as opposed to those who use and abuse recreational drugs – come overwhelmingly from the poorest corners of the working class. Most people I see going through the criminal justice system are on a perpetual mission to blot out their lives. They grew up in grim poverty, with no hope of escape. Their lives have been filled with trauma, and most have mental health problems.

As children, many were abused, physically or sexually. Many lost parents and siblings at a young age. As adults, they lost their children and their homes. Their lives are in a mess, so they self-medicate to obliterate reality and get caught up in a world of criminality to feed that hunger for oblivion. Some see a prison sentence not as a calamity, but as a temporary respite from the pressures and horrors of life outside.

We can change drugs policies to manage the symptoms – and personally I hope that at some stage our politicians will find the courage to fully legalise heroin and other illicit substances, and bring them under the control of the NHS and other agencies to destroy the mass market in misery which keeps the gangland drugs empires in business and thriving. That would not end the problem. It will be damage limitation, but it would be a start.

In the meantime, mindsets must change – including, I’m afraid, the mindsets of some of those who deal with drug addicts professionally. In my experience, some are great, but many are, in my experience, worsening the problem by their judgemental and even pejorative attitudes towards those they are supposed to be helping.

Someone who fails to appear on time for an appointment is deemed to be “failing to engage”. Someone is shown the door at a temporary homeless hostel because they’re under the influence, so they’re sent out to live on the streets, even though the Scottish Government has said no-one should be roofless in Scotland. Someone else has their methadone dose reduced because the professional in charge suspects they may be mixing it with other drugs – and that creates a vicious circle because when methadone is reduced, anyone with a habit will go and top up elsewhere.

Some agencies seem surprised when people whose lives are an eternal whirlwind of chaos behave chaotically. How will demanding that they start to conform to a regular routine work? How will it help to expect them to become as organised as those of us with a regular job? Maybe they should just download one of these time management apps on to a mobile ...

Or, instead, maybe we could start to fit the services around the people who need them rather than for the convenience of the professionals who administer them. Before we even talk about more resources to help stem the annual carnage on our streets, we need a fundamental and honest self-evaluation of current services. What are they trying to achieve? Who are they for?

That would be a step forward, as would a bonfire of the existing drugs laws. But this invisible crisis goes right to the heart of the type of Scotland we want to build. We talk about saving lives. But to do what? Many people I see don’t really care that much whether they live or die. They haven’t much to live for beyond £60 a week Universal Credit. Their lives are a struggle beyond anything most people can imagine.

The drugs nightmare is just one more example that underlines the extreme inequality that is our legacy of decades, generations, centuries of pandering to the greed of the rich and neglecting the poorest and vulnerable. Are we going to do something about it? Yes, independence would give us greater powers and that would allow us to make a start. But achieving that breakthrough will, I suspect, be the easy bit before the real work of building a better nation begins.