In the glossy adoption literature they talk about “therapeutic parenting”, “co-regulation”, and the healing power of unconditional love. No one mentions the times your 10 year old gives you a black eye so vivid that the pharmacist quietly hands you a domestic-violence leaflet. No one mentions the clumps of hair torn out at the root that never grow back, or the moment you lock yourself in the bathroom, heart hammering, wondering whether the next bang on the door will be her shoulder or a knife.

I have lived all of it. And so I read the news that 1,000 adopted children had been returned to care in England over five years with the dull, bone-weary recognition of someone who has stood barefoot in the hallway at two in the morning, blood trickling from a split lip after her daughter’s fists had found their mark again.

I know exactly how close my daughter has come to being one of those thousand. I have also lived the slow, corrosive shame of knowing that, in the darkest seconds, a part of me understands the parents who hand their children back. Not because they stopped loving them, but because they could no longer guarantee anyone’s safety, least of all the child’s own.

I can still remember the flicker of fear in the hallway, as we both sob and I dab at her scraped knuckles with a damp cloth. What if next time it’s not a fist? What if I can’t hold the line? Losing her would devastate me. Yet there have been nights when the physical and emotional onslaught, the constant hyper-vigilance, the marrow-deep exhaustion, has made me wonder, in the shadowed corner of my mind, whether the system that placed her with me even cares when I crack.

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A widespread belief is that adoption offers a “fresh start”. It is a comforting fiction, an insistence that trauma is a knot to be untangled with the right words, not a brain permanently rewired by poison in the womb. The truth is that prenatal exposure to alcohol and drugs doesn’t just “increase the risk”; rather it carves permanent grooves into the developing brain, leaving invisible scars that shape a child’s impulses, emotions and choices for the rest of their lives.

An estimated three quarters of children adopted from care are at risk of having fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). It’s a condition which is almost always undiagnosed because the criteria require confirmed prenatal alcohol exposure — which mothers rarely admit — as well as specific facial features present in just 10% of cases. Many cases of FASD are misdiagnosed as ADHD, autism, or behavioral disorders.

Yet as I learned first hand, if the damage wrought by FASD is invisible on a scan, it is explosive in a living room. The rages start small, a refusal over bedtime, a misplaced top, but quickly escalate, encompassing everything from hyper-arousal, and impulse-control collapse to fury that overwhelms without warning. These are neurological injuries, not moral failings or attachment deficits that can be cured by better parenting. Yet the entire post-adoption support system is built on the pretense that they are.

When Megan’s rages became daily — by four, she was excluded from nursery after biting and scratching teachers until they bled — I begged for the help that was promised in every pre-adoption briefing. But it never came. CAMHS waiting list: two years, a limbo of hold music and platitudes. Adoption Support Fund assessment: another year, buried under bureaucracy. In the meantime I was handed leaflets on “wondering aloud” (“I wonder if you’re feeling angry right now?”) and “time-ins” (sitting quietly together until the storm passes).

I was told I needed to “hold the space” for Megan’s pain, to become a human sponge for the toxicity she’d absorbed before birth. Yet holding the space is difficult when the space contains flying furniture, shattered plates, and the metallic tang of fear in your throat. I tried it all — from endless books on “trauma-informed care” to “PACE” training courses preaching “Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, Empathy”. But books couldn’t soften the rages.

Eventually, after four years of pleading, desperate and hollow-eyed, I wrote to my MP. Only then did the Adoption Support Fund release £4,500 for equine therapy. I cried as I watched Megan, usually so coiled, lean into a pony, its steady warmth somehow reaching the part of her brain the alcohol had scarred, the part that lay beyond my reach. It has kept us together. Without it, we’d have been another disruption statistic.

This April, the Fund was cut by 40%, with the per-child allowance falling from £5,000 to £3,000 a year. Specialist FASD assessments were removed entirely. Families who have waited half a decade for help are now told the budget is exhausted, slamming the door on the very interventions that could prevent breakdowns. One social worker, a weary veteran of the trenches, asked me over a snatched coffee, with bitter laughter: “So the children are 40% less damaged this year, are they? Or are we just 40% more abandoned?”

This is not mere incompetence. It is a quiet decision by the British state that acknowledging the scale of prenatal alcohol damage is too politically fraught. That, after all, would require admitting that thousands of women drink heavily through pregnancy, often in the grip of addiction or despair, and which the welfare system has failed utterly to address. It would also oblige politicians to admit that the NHS has no reliable, standardized way of diagnosing the resulting disability, and that the “fresh start” narrative sold to prospective adopters is a comforting lie, one told to keep them flowing into a system in constant need of new recruits.

It is easier to keep insisting that with enough empathy, enough PACE acronyms, enough therapeutic re-parenting mantras, the child will eventually choose calm over chaos. But they can’t “choose”. The brain does not rewrite itself because a middle-aged woman learns to speak in a softer voice or validate their feelings.

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I have watched friends reach the same precipice, their stories echoing mine. One, a woman I’d met in our drafty support group 11 years ago, locked her ten-year-old son on the porch when he came at his sister with a kitchen knife, eyes wild with the same undiagnosed FASD fury. Social workers arrived the next day and accused her of neglect. They recommended a parenting course. This woman’s child is now in residential care at £250,000 a year to the taxpayer. She is on antidepressants, her confidence shattered, still whispering to me on late-night calls that she “should have tried harder”.

Professor Laura Machin’s research at Lancaster University lays it bare: 38% of adoptive parents seriously consider asking for their child to be removed at some point, a tipping point where love and desperation collide. With proper neurological intervention, from early diagnosis to targeted therapies, that figure could be halved, sparing families and saving the state millions in downstream costs. Instead, we are cutting the only fund that pays for such vital work, outsourcing the fallout to private anguish and public expense.

There is a peculiar cruelty in asking ordinary families to absorb the lifelong consequences of addiction and neglect, then punishing them when the inevitable happens. We are told we are “giving a child a future” — but, in reality, we are being asked to mop up a public-health catastrophe, with prenatal alcohol abuse now the leading preventable cause of developmental disability in the UK, using nothing but love and grit. Then, when things go wrong, some are berated as being deficient parents, their pleas dismissed.

Megan is 13 now. Some weeks are calm. Some nights I still sleep with my bedroom door braced by a chair, listening for the creak of floorboards. I love her fiercely. But I have stopped believing that love is enough. The brain she was born with was shaped before I ever held her, scarred by substances no infant should know. No amount of devotion can unmake that first, irreversible injury.

When things get difficult, I still picture that newborn, rigid, clammy and craving the substances that flowed through her birth mother’s bloodstream. There are thousands of children like Megan, and thousands of parents barricading doors to keep themselves safe. What these children desperately need is support. Instead, the Government is walking away, and society’s most vulnerable children, my daughter among them, will pay the price.

Krykant spent the last five years of his life campaigning for radical drug reform. His activism went beyond his previous calls for clean needles, safe spaces to inject, and softer-touch policing. Krykant, in the end, became something of an extremist, envisioning a world where addiction carried no stigma whatsoever; where the identity of “drug-user” could be worn with pride; and where obtaining and using powerful, addictive psychoactive substances was a simple matter of equality carrying no social or legal penalties. But he hadn’t always been that way. Something changed over the years, as his activist star soared. While many have already attempted to sum up Krykant’s legacy, as an intelligent and energetic campaigner, he was far more complex than that. 

His life story was, and still is, compelling. A former addict who had once been on the streets, hospitalized with psychosis in his teens, he turned his life around. He secured a job, a family and a global community of friends and fellowship. In other words, Krykant seemed to be flourishing, and this was in large part due to his abstinence-based recovery — when you eschew all mood- and mind-altering substances with an understanding that addiction is an illness. 

This contrasts with the prevailing treatment of harm-reduction which, among other things, involves managing addiction by prescribing less harmful substances or mitigating the health risks associated with using. Harm reduction saves and stabilizes countless lives every day, but for some with severe cases of long-term addiction, it becomes a form of purgatory. When an addict of this extreme variety buys into the idea that they can, in some circumstances, safely use drugs — whether prescribed by a doctor or obtained on the street — it’s only a matter of time before the blue lights start flashing. 

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What many people don’t know about Krykant, because he edited much of his history when he embraced the harm-reduction philosophy that made him famous, is that he spent 11 years sober before he became a campaigner. His journey can be traced on social media, from when he began working in support services while firmly rooted in the 12-step model. It was at the height of Scotland’s drug death crisis, in 2019, that Krykant felt called to do more — publicly. He aligned himself with “You Keep Talking, We Keep Dying”, a campaign spearheaded by Anne Marie Ward, CEO of campaigning charity Faces and Voices of Recover, to push for urgent reforms in drug treatment and policy. 

He turned up at Ward’s event in Glasgow, in a suit and tie and his finest game face. From the outset, those around him sensed that Peter was seeking not just policy change, but a highly visible platform from which to advocate for it. The long-deadlocked debate over safe consumption rooms offered him both. He sought, in his words, to move forward the “political football” on safe consumption, encouraging more thoughtful debate on the scourge of Scottish drug deaths — at that time and presently the worst in Europe.

As his campaigning grew, Krykant was likelier to be seen on the evening news than at the recovery meetings which had been the foundation of his sobriety. And in a bold, headline-grabbing move, he converted an old ambulance into a mobile drug-consumption facility, parking it on the streets of Glasgow and daring the authorities to intervene. The optics were powerful. But this wasn’t just a politically astute stunt: it was a heartfelt act of protest against inertia. Krykant argued that if official safe consumption sites weren’t allowed, then people were going to die wretchedly in alleyways, stairwells — or alone in their homes. 

His actions helped drag the issue into the political mainstream, forcing formerly suspicious tabloids to adopt a softer editorial tone on drug addicts. All this also earned Krykant international recognition. He became, in effect, the poster boy for harm reduction, an ally for canny operators across the harm-reduction space, always keen to publicize their work by platforming others who had “lived it”.

Peter Krykant’s activism, particularly his unsanctioned overdose prevention van, helped push Scotland toward officially piloting the UK’s first drug consumption room, reframing drug policy as a public health issue. His work legitimized lived-experience voices in policymaking, and accelerated national debate on harm reduction and decriminalization. Whatever your view on this issue, and there are many, nobody can ever take that away from him.

But — don’t I know it — this platform comes with risks. Those close to Krykant knew the truth: he had relapsed not long after launching his van, using the same drugs as the people he was trying to help. This was an open secret among politicians, charity workers, and journalists, as well as many of us in the recovery community. When dealing with addicts in relapse, it’s not always clear what the best course of action is.

The waters run all the muddier because addicts, by our very nature, become secretive and dishonest out of shame and fear. Krykant didn’t owe everyone every detail of his life. But having been put on a pedestal for his immense efforts, being honest about his own struggles would have been that much harder. The few who raised concerns, particularly from abstinence-based recovery communities, were dismissed as bitter, jealous, or out of step with the “progressive” mood. It felt almost taboo to publicly point out that Krykant was in danger, and even more futile to challenge him behind the scenes.

All the while, those close to Krykant watched as his ideology shifted from moderate to unhinged. I’d even argue that his addiction took his politics hostage: the more visible he became, the more absent he was in his private life and community. In the early days, he still spoke of the need for detox beds, for wider pathways into recovery, and for a more thoughtful debate about the role of medication and abstinence. But as Krykant started obsessing over harm reduction — and became more dependent on the organizations that affirmed his experiences — his outlook changed. He became part of what one former friend described as the “drugs pride” brigade: people who didn’t just advocate for safety and support, but who recast active addiction itself as a valid, even empowering identity. This is the sort of idea that only someone in active addiction could adopt, and only those with no experience of it could affirm.

As Krykant struggled to reconcile the painful, humbling backslide into addiction with his newfound prominence, his broader politics became stranger too. He ran as an independent candidate for the Scottish Parliament, and when that failed, he began aligning with voices who, if they had their way, would see town centers and city streets lined with vending machines dispensing heroin and Valium. He adopted the language of “People Who Use Drugs” (PWUD) and “Person Who Injects Drugs” (PWID) — monikers that reframed destructive, home-wrecking compulsions as informed lifestyle choices. He blocked critics, even friends, and built a social media echo chamber that only told him what he wanted, needed, to hear.

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Like it or not, Krykant’s best years were objectively spent in the rooms of 12-step fellowships. Yet he came not only to despise this method of sobriety, but to publicly condemn it and discourage others from trying it. This is a textbook relapse. In such a situation, the urge to create a face-saving justification for your descent back into addiction is strong. Krykant, sadly, had no shortage of backers willing to bolster whatever tall tale he required to justify his increasingly desperate circumstances. Along the way, he abandoned the belief system and community that had helped him stay clean for over a decade — a decision that would cost him his life.

Tributes have flowed since his death — from politicians, journalists, charities — each reaffirming the noble story: that Krykant battled for the marginalized, that he broke through political silence, that he cared. And all of that is true. But it is not the whole truth. These stories erase the part that matters most: the human cost of turning private pain into public performance, and the way a man who wanted to save lives slowly lost his own as his addiction became awkward for his gang of civic cheerleaders.

There are lessons here for everyone. For campaigners, a reminder of the dangers of building movements around individuals still in crisis. For journalists, a call to interrogate narratives rather than merely regurgitate them. For charities and funders, a warning against mistaking visibility for stability. And, for all of us, an invitation to tell more honest stories — about addiction, about recovery, and about the fine line between advocacy and exploitation.

Krykant’s legacy is assured, and he leaves Scotland’s drug debate in a far better place than he found it. While there was little we agreed towards the end, I was one of the people he reached out to for help when things took a bad turn a few years ago. And what he was pleading for back then was a rehab bed. He wanted to get sober. He understood what he suffered from and what he needed to get well. Along the way, though, something changed. Make of that what you will.

Krykant wanted so badly for his legacy to be about harm-reduction heroes and compassion for drug users. But what about those who amplified his message that using is a lifestyle choice — who encouraged his shift into activism and cast him as an expert on all things addiction while his private life collapsed? Did they show him real compassion and friendship of the sort that may occasionally involve a hard truth, some tough love, as opposed to vague platitudes and endless affirmation? Or did they exploit him, as a means to a political end, then run for cover when things headed south?

Luckily for them, but sadly for the rest of us, the whole truth likely died with Krykant. May he rest in peace. And may the rest hang their heads in shame.

This scene takes place just after midday on a Monday — nothing unusual. Commuters and taxis pass by, indifferent to the events surrounding them. This is life in Europe’s drug death capital. Yet, for the city’s marginalised substance users, a new hope has been promised in the form of Scotland’s first sanctioned drug consumption room (SDCR). Scheduled to open last week, safety checks on the building have led to delays. The stunted opening seems in keeping with Scotland’s troubled approach to its drug crisis — the worst in Europe and second only to America, globally. 

The road to the UK’s first official SDCR has been long and winding. The first facility of its kind was run illegally by activist Peter Krykant out of a van in the city centre. In perhaps the most significant example of direct action in the history of drug campaigning in the UK, Krykant’s activism was instrumental in mainstreaming debate around Scottish drug reform, influencing the eventual approval of the UK’s first sanctioned drug consumption room in Glasgow. 

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Running parallel to Kyrkant’s campaign was Glasgow’s Heroin Assisted Treatment (HAT) programme, launched in 2019, which aimed to provide chronic heroin users with a pharmaceutical-grade substitute (diamorphine) under medical supervision. This harm reduction approach sought to reduce overdose deaths, minimise the harms associated with street heroin, and improve the quality of life for participants who had not responded to other treatments. 

Despite the initial hope, various reports on its effectiveness present a mixed picture. Participants saw improved health, reduced criminal activity, and access to additional services. However, enrolment was low with only 20 participants while also being expensive at an estimated annual cost of £12,000–£15,000 per person. This led to criticism of its scalability and limited impact on Scotland’s broader drug crisis, especially given the underfunding of other drug treatment services, namely residential rehab. While certainly a significant development in the long arc of a crisis now spanning decades, the HAT programme’s overall impact was nothing to write home about. This is, of course, a running theme where government-backed harm reduction strategies are concerned. 

Legal heaven and earth have been moved to establish a safe drug consumption room in Glasgow. This was initially hindered by UK legislation that criminalises drug possession and use. However, after years of advocacy and pressure from public health experts and local officials, the Scottish government worked with then Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, Scotland’s chief legal officer, to find a pathway. In 2023, Bain agreed not to prosecute users of the proposed facility, effectively decriminalising drug use within the site and allowing the pilot programme to proceed without changes to UK-wide drug laws. This move marked a significant step forward in harm reduction efforts amid Scotland’s ongoing drug crisis. But in truth, like many policies adopted in Scotland, it came about 10 years too late and is not part of any wider strategy to steady the ship.  

While the SDCR is expected to reduce overdoses, infections, and connect users to services, the deeper issues driving demand for drugs persist. People in deprived communities are 18 times more likely to die from drug-related causes, pointing to poverty as a root cause. The healthcare offer made to the poorest is always inferior, but this inequality is compounded for addicts who face additional stigma in healthcare settings, where addiction is too often seen as a moral failing rather than a health condition. Treatment options remain limited, and SDCRs, such as methadone programmes, will at best merely keep users stable until better solutions emerge. Be under no illusions that this action alone will make any significant impact on the overall crisis.

That’s why it’s odd that the Scottish government chose to expend so much political capital creating the legal headroom for this initiative, because even if it succeeds as hoped, its impact will be minimal. In truth, politically speaking, a legal standoff with London was the path of least resistance when you consider the true scale of the crisis and the action on social inequality required to turn it around. Creating a constitutional spectacle produces a sense that something radical is being done when in truth, the status-quo has simply been repackaged. 

Rather than take more politically risky action that may involve ruffling the feathers of middle-class voters, leaders with no coherent vision for a more comprehensive treatment landscape look instead to well-placed harm-reduction advocates who propose more of the same initiatives. The challenge facing the SDRC is immense. Even if it all goes well, its remit is limited and questions remain as to how exactly these short-term, pop-up initiatives will have any real impact on a nationwide epidemic.  

Consider the practicalities of actually getting people through the door of the facility when it opens. One challenge is geographical: expecting vulnerable addicts to travel into the city centre frequently is unrealistic. Advocates argue there are plenty of drug users within the city centre already who are eligible, but many dispute not only those figures but also the merits of a service set up to target a narrow cohort of serious addicts within a small urban area. Arguably, it’s the intravenous drug users in the city’s surrounding housing estates who are not only most vulnerable but who are also creating the greatest negative impacts in their communities. Wouldn’t they stand to benefit most, with their participation reaping greater social benefits? In any event, how will they be incentivised to make the trip? How likely is it that they will hold onto a bag of heroin and jump a bus into town before safely injecting?  

Even once enrolled, participants face numerous barriers. Many will fear being drawn onto the social work or criminal justice radars merely by identifying themselves or filling out paperwork. Distrust of authority is pathological among this marginalised community for obvious reasons. If they do present at the SCDR, who will greet them? Who will reassure them and gain their trust? Will drug workers with lived experience lead this important work, or will well-meaning but less streetwise staff who arouse suspicion in users pull the strings behind the scenes? Ultimately, will the same class dynamics that subtly underscore lopsided drug policy and debate in Scotland be needlessly replicated, or has serious work been undertaken to identify and correct for that problem? Then there’s the very basic harm-reduction paradox produced by the pilot’s central focus on intravenous drug use — will smoking heroin or cocaine be discouraged even though it’s often safer than injecting? 

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The notion the SDCR will act as a portal to other services only sounds plausible if you know nothing of what’s actually out there in this baron treatment hellscape. What other services do we mean, exactly? Even people with no history of drug problems may wait months for the most basic mental health counselling. The complexities of lives ravaged by addiction, police involvement and homelessness often require specialist multi-faceted care, that is, quite simply, unavailable for most people. Addicts also face lengthy waits — up to a year — for rehab placements should they desire one, by which time the addiction may have deepened, or the desire to enter a residential setting may have waned. We don’t have an integrated system that pulls in the same direction as in Norway, where, for example, rehab facilities are integrated with some prisons. In Scotland, different organisational factions operate independently of one another, pushing their own agendas, pursuing their own interests, often based on selective assessments of a narrow evidence-base and a keen awareness of what’s “trending” with the hapless Government holding the purse-strings.

Staff turnover in the drug sector is also high due to burnout, demoralisation and short-term funding settlements while wider health services are overwhelmed. Unlike Germany or Switzerland — cited often by advocates as best practice that could be easily replicated — Scotland’s fragmented and underfunded services, operating well overcapacity in a more structurally unjust society, will hamper similar success, irrespective of noble intentions. 

I want it to succeed. If not simply for the minor morale boost it may generate at a time where even seasoned campaigners like me have grown apathetic or walked away from the fight to regroup. Despite critics being labelled regularly as cynical (admittedly with some justification), it’s decades of dire harm reduction outcomes in Scotland that fuel this scepticism. The problem is not harm reduction as a philosophy, it’s the fragmented and untimely manner in which Scotland implements these policies. We’re always playing catch up while dealing with the consequences of unforced errors like cutting safe benzodiazepine prescribing (which drove demand for deadly street Valium) or slashing funding to services that demonstrably save lives. This has been the way of things since the first methadone programme was introduced as a treatment in the Nineties and it remains the predominant treatment for heroin addiction despite showing up on around half of all drug death certificates since records began. 

Nearly 40 years later, with drug deaths now many times higher than in those early days, harm reduction remains the only real tool in Scotland’s drug policy box — a political choice and not one imposed by Westminster. The safe consumption room pilot must be viewed in this broader context. Rather than a clean break offering something new, it’s the latest iteration of the same idea we’ve seen before, yet for some reason, we are encouraged to expect different results. Rumours of staff walking out after inductions, a defensive management team unwilling to address tough questions, and the fact the SDCR was still advertising job vacancies as recently as mid-September (one month before it was due to open), suggest to this hardened cynic deeper issues behind the delay than the building safety checks cited. 

If the countless headline-grabbing initiatives we’ve seen throughout the past decade — as deaths have risen to intolerable levels — are anything to go by, this may mark yet another harm reduction gimmick struggling before it even begins. I hope I’m wrong, but it all reads like a familiar tale and one that tells the real story of Scotland’s drug crisis.

One of the handful of democratic states that still carries out the death penalty — a club that also includes the US and Japan — Singapore executed 11 people last year, making it one of the 10 most prolific judicial executioners in the world. The dawn hangings were put on hold during the pandemic, but the state is now catching up on its backlog, with three carried out in recent weeks, including the first execution of a woman in almost 20 years. Saridewi Binte Djamani, a 45-year-old Singaporean, was put to death last month, having been found guilty in 2018 of possessing “not less than 30.72 grams” of heroin.

The death penalty, mandatory for a range of offences since 1975, has long been held up as a sign that this prosperous island has a dark side. Less commented upon are the disparities it magnifies, which call into question one of the country’s most cherished central claims — that it is a meritocracy, with advancement open to anyone, regardless of their background.

Singapore is a multi-racial blend: ethnic Chinese make up around three-quarters of the population and dominate the highest positions in politics and business. Malays are the next largest ethnic group, while Indians are the third. While all racial groups have benefited from Singapore’s soaring economic growth since independence, Malays have lagged behind; Malay households have the lowest income, on average, of the three ethnic groups. Last year, a group of UN experts expressed concern that a “disproportionate number” of those being sentenced to death for drug offences came from racial minorities and poorer backgrounds. Between 2015 and 2020, 44 people were sentenced to death in Singapore for drug offences. Of those, four were Chinese, three were Indian and 37 were Malay. All three of those executed in the last few weeks were Malay.

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But not all drug dealers are equal in the eyes of the city-state. Lo Hsing Han, one of Myanmar’s richest men and, according to the US government, “one of the world’s key heroin traffickers” had strong financial ties with Singapore until his death in 2013. His daughter-in-law owned 10 companies there, all of which were sanctioned by the US in 2008. The US government also found that Lo’s conglomerate, Asia World, provided “critical support” to Myanmar’s military junta. According to Lo’s obituary in The Economist, by 1998, more than half of Singapore’s investments in Myanmar were made with Asia World.

Singapore is now a democracy, but one with an unusual compact between state and people. After independence in 1965, in the space of a few decades, its founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and his successors transformed Singapore from a colonial port into a global manufacturing hub and financial centre. It is a comfortable place to live, with low unemployment, high-quality state-built housing, an exceptional public-education system and one of the world’s highest life expectancies, at 83 years. There is a fairly high degree of personal freedom, though political debate is tightly circumscribed. Singaporeans are, in general, content to accept this bargain, raising few questions about the way things are run.

For those who do, the consequences can be harsh. There is little space for protest. A few years ago, an activist named Jolovan Wham was charged with illegal protest after standing outside a police station holding a cardboard sign with a smiley face drawn on it. Ministers take an unusually prickly view of critics, with a history of successfully suing bloggers, foreign media and political opponents for defamation. While elections are free and fair, the press is largely fettered — nowadays, by self-censorship in newsrooms. There is limited scope for campaigning that challenges the government.

Nevertheless, Singapore has always had plenty of foreign admirers, among them Donald Trump. At his 2024 campaign launch at Mar-a-Lago last year, Trump called for drug traffickers to be executed and said the US should look to Singapore. “Singapore has no drug problem. They don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said. It’s fair to say that drug misuse is small-scale; last year, Singapore, a country of 5.6 million, arrested 2,800 people for drug abuse.

The government says there is overwhelming public support for maintaining the death penalty, citing surveys that find around three-quarters of those polled support capital punishment for the most serious crimes. But that consensus might be fraying. In April last year, around 300 people attended a candlelight vigil for Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, a 33-year-old Malaysian man convicted of trafficking 43 grams of heroin, a few tablespoons of the drug that were found strapped to his thigh when he entered Singapore. His lawyers had argued he had a learning disability and had been coerced into carrying the package.

The vigil for Nagaenthran took place in Hong Lim Park, a small patch of greenery on the edge of Singapore’s financial district, and the only place in the country where citizens are allowed to protest without a police permit. His family was not allowed to attend, as foreign nationals are barred from joining such demonstrations. He was executed two days later.

Nagaenthran’s case attracted international attention, with Richard Branson among those deploring the execution and describing him as a victim both of drug cartels and a “justice system that so consistently seems to fail minorities”. A few months after the hanging, Luke Levy, a National University of Singapore student, walked on stage for his graduation ceremony and pulled out a piece of A4 from his gown pocket with a message protesting “state murder”. Levy was edited out of the video of the event (his university said the ceremony was “not a forum for advocacy”). He is not alone, though. Earlier this month, graffiti against the death penalty — featuring a syringe and a hanged man grasping a dollar sign — appeared in an underpass outside a metro station, a bold act in a country where graffiti can be punishable with up to three years in prison and corporal punishment, delivered with a rattan cane.

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Kirsten Han, 34, a journalist and activist, tells me that, growing up in Singapore, she was happy to accept the view that the death penalty was necessary for public safety: “I had the impression that the people on death row would be those running drug syndicates and making huge profits, and that it would be possible to eliminate the trade through punishment.” She is now a prominent voice against capital punishment. It was volunteering at The Online Citizen, an independent news site, that brought about her epiphany: “It was my first opportunity to read up about the law, meet the family members of people on death row, and get to know the lawyers and activists working on this issue.” Han says, as a Singaporean, campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty has involved “a lot of unlearning”.

In the face of criticism, Singapore’s politicians tend to be thin-skinned. Lee Kuan Yew — who died in 2015 — had studied law at Cambridge before being called to the Bar in 1950, and frequently addressed his political opponents with a truculent barrister’s courtroom swagger. “Human rights?” he once asked. “Are they bankable?” This tradition of verbal sparring has been taken up by K. Shanmugam, another lawyer, who is the long-serving Minister for Home Affairs. He recently swatted down opponents of the death penalty as “narco liberals”.

Lee liked to argue that Confucian traditions imbued Singaporeans with a strong allegiance to the group and a reverence for scholarly leaders. It was a rewriting of Singapore’s turbulent history, which included violent labour disputes when the country was breaking away from colonial rule. But it allowed him to present a convenient narrative that challenged what he called “the unlimited individualism of the Americans”.

More recently, in response to a question about press freedom, prominent Singaporean statesman Tharman Shanmugaratnam said there were other kinds of liberty: “You aspire to the liberty of living in a city that is not defined by its most disorderly elements,” he said. Yet its reluctance to budge on capital punishment has made it something of an outlier in the region. Thailand has scrapped the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking, Malaysia is observing a moratorium on all executions, and penal reforms in Indonesia have created the possibility of commuting death sentences after 10 years if a prisoner maintains good conduct.

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'Tough on crime' won't rescue the Tories

By Chris Clarke

Such shifts make it harder to defend an absolute position as an exemplar of stern “Asian values”. But there are signs that moderation is creeping into Singapore’s dispensation of justice. Last year, a drug courier’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the Court of Appeal, after judges found that his depression and substance use had combined to impair his mental responsibility.

But Singapore doesn’t have much incentive to make changes. In the face of current geopolitical tensions, it is unusually well-placed to prosper. Hong Kong, its old rival as Asia’s main business hub, is now firmly in Beijing’s authoritarian grip. This makes Singapore one of the few places on the continent that can steer a line between the world’s two superpowers: it has a defence partnership with the US, but close economic ties with China. It’s a place where both Western and Chinese businesses are comfortable setting up regional HQs — like Vienna in the Cold War, but with better noodles. One consequence of this is that Singapore is fairly impervious to external criticism, its rulers more comfortable than ever in defining liberty according to their own measures. And even if Singaporeans have been increasingly assertive in recent years, wanting more of a say in how their country is run, for most citizens, the death penalty infringes little on their personal liberty.

And yet, there may be a push for greater latitude on recreational drugs from Singaporeans, who have observed the relaxing of laws in the West. Singapore’s present and future success is bound up with white-collar jobs in finance, coding and hi-tech manufacturing that require education and a degree of independent thinking. A population that’s encouraged to use their initiative at work is less likely to accept a strictly “just say no” position from their government.

Change might also come from the top. When it comes to the sin businesses, there’s a precedent for shifting official attitudes, especially when there are dollars to be generated. Gambling was once frowned upon, feared for its potential to corrode the nation’s work ethic. But the government changed its mind, ostensibly to boost tourism. If arguments based on the freedom to choose don’t wash, the economic imperative could drive Singapore to loosen up on cannabis at least. The country is unlikely to let go of the death penalty, in part because it is a marker of Singapore’s identity — more ruthless than those soft Europeans. But if laws for some drugs are relaxed, there may be fewer occasions when it needs to be imposed.

Ye Gon was making his fortune, say US and Mexican prosecutors, by importing the flu medicine pseudoephedrine from Chinese labs and selling it to Mexican gangsters who cooked it into crystal meth to traffic to the United States. A fan of high-stakes poker, Ye Gon was then jetting to Las Vegas, where he lost $125 million at tables (a casino was later ordered to hand over much of this to the US government) and bought a million-dollar home for a casino hostess. After a lengthy legal battle, Ye Gon was extradited back here to Mexico, where he sits in a high-security prison on drugs, organised crime, money laundering, and weapons charges.

At the time, when I covered the story, Ye Gon appeared to be a passing novelty. Importing chemicals from China contrasted with the cocaine and heroin trade I was investigating, in which you can go to the mountains and witness the peasant farmers harvest coca leaves and opium poppies. It’s apparent now, though, that Ye Gon was a pioneer, and that Mexican cartels have followed his lead to reshape their entire industry — with perilous consequences for Americans.

Since that record bust, Mexican traffickers have gradually shifted the core of their business from plant-based drugs to synthetic drugs — those created using man-made chemicals. These include meth and illegally-made fentanyl as well as others, such as ketamine. Synthetic drugs are cheaper to produce and more lethal, with fentanyl many times more powerful than heroin. To churn out these synthetics, cartels followed Ye Gon’s lead to forge an unholy alliance with shady elements of the Asian chemical industry.

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The scales gradually tilted until 2018, when US agents on the border seized more crystal meth than cocaine (both considered “uppers” and party drugs), and 2021, when they also seized more fentanyl than heroin (both considered “downers”). The trend has accelerated in 2022, with US agents nabbing 14,000 pounds of fentanyl, which was seven times the amount of heroin, and 175,000 pounds of meth, two-and-a-half times the amount of cocaine.

Marijuana was once a big cash crop for Mexican traffickers, but border seizures have plummeted since 2012, when US states began legalising recreational weed. Further south, Colombia is still producing enormous amounts of cocaine, but much is now going to the booming European market. Meanwhile, the biggest shipments to, and profits from, the United States are in synthetics. This paradigm shift has transformed the logistics of Mexican drug trafficking.

Traditionally, drug trafficking relied on plantations of poppies and coca leaves, which are vulnerable to aerial crop spraying. Today, the mass production of synthetic drugs involves two behemoths of globalisation: supply chains of cargo ships, and the pharmaceutical industry. Pacific cities such as Manzanillo, Mexico’s biggest container port, have become bloody trafficking hubs. Pill mills can be anywhere, from quiet Mexican suburbs to right on the border itself.

The cartel shift to synthetics coincides closely with the soaring rise in US drug deaths. Back in 2007, about 27,000 Americans lost their lives in overdoses. By 2021, the number had quadrupled to 107,000 deaths. The majority, 71,000, involved fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. The second highest, 32,000, involved “psychostimulants” including meth. Traffickers are also mixing fentanyl into cocaine and heroin, causing more deaths with those. The rise in overdoses is especially sharp over the last five years, just as busts of fentanyl on the border have soared.

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But beyond the stats is the human pain. Most of the victims are in the prime of their lives and some are teenagers. Millions of parents, siblings, children, and friends bear the loss.

There are various forces behind the US overdose epidemic. Pharmaceutical giants dished out too many legal opioids that fuelled addiction, as courts continue to hear. Shutting down industries in the Rust Belt drove workers to despair, and the pandemic and lockdown were terrible for mental health. But it is hard to deny that changes in the supply of illegal drugs — from cocaine and heroin to synthetic meth and fentanyl — are a major factor behind the ballooning death toll.

Like everything in American life, the overdose epidemic gets dragged into partisan politics. Republicans have sought to take a hard line, lobbying the White House to classify fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction and Mexican cartels as terrorist groups. In their midterm attack ads, Republican candidates tied fentanyl deaths to illegal immigration. Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed hardest for “harm reduction” programmes, especially in deep-blue cities like San Francisco. But the level of open drug abuse there has drawn fire from both Republicans and moderate Democrats.

After covering the human catastrophe of narco violence here in Mexico for two decades, I have mixed feelings about the latest political row. I have long been a critic of the War on Drugs, which has failed to stop the drug trade while creating a huge black market for ultraviolent cartels. When US states began legalising marijuana, I celebrated it, thinking that the cartels and drug violence could slowly become a thing of the past.

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But the rise of synthetics and the sheer level of overdose deaths have rattled my thinking. It is evident that Mexican traffickers, who work with corrupt officials here, are indeed pumping ever more perilous drugs northward. When cartels mainly moved cocaine and cannabis there was an argument, at least, that they were providing Americans with products they demanded. But with the perilous fentanyl, which some people take unwittingly, there is validity to the claim they are flooding poison over the border. The question remains, however, as to what can be done about it.

In Manzanillo, I sit and watch the vast container ships come into the bay from across the globe and line up to unload their cargo. Last year, the port handled more than 3 million TEU’s (20-foot container units) — a vast amount of cargo for synthetics and their precursors to be hidden in. In a restaurant in the port, I meet up with the owner of a freight company who brings goods in from China. Working in the port for decades, he says smuggling has always been rife but has evolved over time. Today, Mexico’s two most powerful mafias, the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel, operate there and are always looking for shippers to move their products. “This is the gateway to China and all of Asia,” he says. “They have to be here to get access to chemicals.”

Opioids or precursors can be hidden under a false bill of lading and disguised as a legitimate chemical, he explains. Customs inspectors have to bust open a container and run a test, and while they are doing that, other loads can get through. It can also be hard to keep up with all the different substances. The International Narcotics Control Board lists hundreds of precursors for synthetic drugs, and they are likely scratching the surface. Scientific papers say there are more than 1,400 variants of fentanyl, and that “every year new fentanyl analog compounds, or fentanyls, appear”.

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Smugglers also have another technique, the shipper explains, which they call “remoras” or suckerfish, in which they bring in the contraband alongside legitimate cargo. Before the ship gets into port, the contraband is thrown over the side and taken ashore in small boats. It would, therefore, be difficult to stop the chemicals even if Mexican officials were all honest — which they are not. The shipper explains that intermediaries take bribes and deal with customs so that containers can pass straight through. “I can’t see this changing,” he said. “Only a dictatorship or invasion would stop this.”

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, claims to fight corruption, and over the last two years he has put elite marine military units in charge of the ports to clamp down on trafficking. “It is translating to more security, less contraband, more decommissions of drugs, above all fentanyl and chemical drugs,” AMLO said in November visiting Manzanillo. “It used to be silver or lead,” he went on, referring to the silver of a bribe or the lead of a bullet. “Now this has changed.”

However, the quantity of drugs being seized on the US border signal that fentanyl and meth are still coming through Mexico in vast quantities. Furthermore, AMLO’s position on cartels and crime is muddled. On the one hand, he has boosted the power of the military, created a new National Guard, and kept soldiers on the streets. On the other hand, he has talked of the need to avoid fighting cartels, and to have “hugs not bullets”.

AMLO’s call for peace is understandable considering the carnage in Mexico. Since President Felipe Calderón launched a military crackdown on cartels in 2006, there have been firefights reminiscent of civil wars, more than 300,000 murders, mass graves, and thousands of disappearances. But in practice, “hugs not bullets” has meant allowing some gangsters to act with impunity. In 2019, after soldiers arrested Ovidio Guzmán, the son of kingpin “El Chapo”, on an indictment for trafficking drugs including crystal meth, hundreds of gunmen took to the streets of the city of Culiacán. In response, AMLO ordered Guzmán’s release. By bowing to cartel intimidation, AMLO has raised the spectre of a country that is militarised but where powerful gangsters still flout the law.

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Washington has also put pressure on China to stop the chemicals at the source. In 2019, China classified all variants of fentanyl as controlled substances, fulfilling a promise to President Donald J. Trump. However, a US congressional advisory group concluded that Chinese chemists were getting round the ban. “Chinese traffickers are using various strategies to circumvent new regulations, including focusing on chemical precursors, relocating some manufacturing to India, rerouting precursor shipments through third countries, and leveraging marketing schemes to avoid detection,” says the report from 2021 by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

But given China denies its responsibility for the drug epidemic, what can be done about it? If Beijing really clamped down, it could probably reduce the supply in the short term. But there are other countries where precursors could be made. Moreover, as former DEA agent Leo Silva tells me, the cartels are looking to take their drug production to the next step. “These guys are now recruiting chemistry professors from universities so they can actually produce fentanyl in labs,” he says. “Their goal is to create the precursors in Mexico so they can also stop getting the precursors from China and dealing with them… So they can produce more, and keep more profits.”

***

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A hit squad compared to a “well-oiled murder machine”. A lawyer and journalist shot on the streets of Amsterdam. A blasé approach to killing the wrong person — there’s even slang for every accidental victim: a vergismoord. Welcome to the Marengo trial, where 17 men stand accused of involvement in six murders, four attempted murders and preparing for six others between 2015 and 2017.

Fear hangs in the air around this court case, telling a tale of a country where the hydra of organised crime has so many heads that it is threatening the very rule of law. When the trial resumed this month, journalists were asked to sign agreements not to name judges or prosecutors, for fear of them being targeted. After reports that co-chief suspect Ridouan Taghi was planning a jailbreak, the streets around the fortified courtroom known as the Bunker are ringed with police cars and trained teams made up of police and soldiers.

The Marengo is only the latest in a series of organised crime trials to shake the Netherlands. This year, Dutch courts are also trying alleged criminal druglord Roger P., accused of turning shipping containers into an underworld prison, with its own gruesome “torture chamber”. Meanwhile, a Marengo side-trial involves motorbike club Caloh Wagoh members charged with shooting dead five people, preparing three other murders and “putting another seven people on the waiting list to be killed”.

“I call The Netherlands a ‘narco-state 2.0’,” says Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union. “We aren’t Mexico, with 14,000 dead bodies, but in our parallel economy, there is an attack on public order and unprecedented numbers of people with personal security — politicians, judges, prosecutors, police staff, journalists — because there is still a serious risk from organised crime. It is a huge problem, being tackled on every front, but we have a long way to go.”

Struijs first raised concerns that this small, well-connected trading nation has “characteristics of a narco-state” four years ago. At the time, there was a muted political response. But then the brother of the Marengo crown witness Nabil B was shot dead and the crown witness’s original lawyer, Dirk Wiersum, was gunned down outside his house. Finally, last July, celebrated crime reporter Peter R de Vries, who had unconventionally agreed to act as Nabil B’s representative, was shot in the head on a busy central Amsterdam street and died of his wounds.

Today, few would argue that increasingly violent crime has clawed its fingers deep into civil society. But as Lieselot Bisschop, criminologist at Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam, points out, before you can combat the crime, it is important to understand who is involved and how. She and a team of researchers have been looking at the key drug runners’ entry and exit point of Rotterdam port, where last year a Hit and Run Cargo team (HARC) confiscated a record 72,808 kilos of cocaine plus another record of 1,500 kilos of heroin. “Whether it’s a good thing that they are catching more, I don’t know — is more going through anyway?” says Prof Bisschop. “The quantity aspect is always very challenging. It’s a dark number, guesstimates.”

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Meanwhile, the Netherlands is apparently a centre of synthetic drug manufacture, with regular busts of “professional” crystal meth and MDMA labs, especially in Noord Brabant. When international police decrypted millions of messages on devices criminals thought were secure — such as Sky and EncroChat, and the Dutch decoded Pretty Good Privacy software for Blackberry’s in the Marengo case — they lit up a web of crime.

Experts agree the Netherlands’s infrastructure is key for both legal and illegal trade. In their 2020 book, Nederland Drugsland, Dutch police academy professor Pieter Tops and journalist Jan Tromp explored how criminals exploit its efficient ports, good roads, and strong financial and digital infrastructure. “The Netherlands has long been a trading country — not just the harbours but also our high-quality internet environment. We have huge numbers of bankers and our country is central in Europe in terms of all kinds of transport and transit,” says Struijs. “We have huge numbers of imports, which means a lot of drugs are mixed with legal trade, coming in containers of fruit or liquor. Organised crime takes advantage of the legal infrastructure.”

Corruption is another factor. As a nation, the Dutch are keen to make a deal — and regular businesses haven’t always been too fussy about carrying out background checks, as various banking money laundering cases and high tax haven rankings show. The NVB Dutch banking association says an estimated €16 billion in illegally-earned cash washes around each year.

Personal corruption is also a problem in a port 40km long and with 180,000 employees, says Bisschop. “Within Europe, it is definitely the gateway for any kind of trade and probably for cocaine. Over the years, the port has become more physically and digitally secure. We think this has contributed to more pressure on the people in the port. Basically, you need corruption to pull it off — both public and private, not just police and customs but also planners in container terminals. You need someone on the inside.”

So in court, says veteran crime reporter Saskia Belleman, there has been a spate of cases against allegedly corrupt customs staff, shipping and port employees, partly as a consequence of a Dutch gedoogcultuur of looking the other way. There are also concerns about so-called “collectors”, often young men who trespass into the harbour and collect drugs.

Nobody knows if the Netherlands is worse than other European port countries in terms of international organised crime, but its soft drug culture is undoubtedly a weak spot. Although smoking cannabis and coffee shops selling the drug are tolerated, it is illegal to grow commercially. This means that cafes offer a legally tolerated channel for criminal activity, and a training ground for young criminals.

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In the Netherlands, it’s become increasingly common to read about the ethnic aspect of organised crime — the so-called “Mocro Maffia” Moroccan-origin mafia which inspired a true crime book and spin-off television series. But Peter Schouten, one of the new lawyers for the crown witness in the Marengo trial, says: “It’s not true that it’s only people with another ‘heritage’. Certain gangs have a kind of micro-organism, a gangland where there’s a lot of the same culture, but there are other gangs arrested, and you read stories saying that the new kingpin is ‘Bolle’ Jos from Brabant.”

It’s hard to measure organised crime, partly because victims don’t always make reports, but ethnic minorities are overrepresented as crime suspects. Statistics Netherlands researcher Maarten Bloem says, though, that “if you correct for age, education level, socio-economic category, there is not much difference between different ethnic origins”. He concludes: “It’s not so much about someone’s colour but the situation in which they find themselves.”

It is unclear whether the segregated, Dutch grammar school system helps contribute to excluding certain groups, too: critics say it selects too young, hammers in socio-economic difference, and makes no account for innately-talented children who speak Dutch as an additional language.

Crime, after all, can be seen as a way out of poverty and an equal opportunities recruiter. So there’s a widespread recognition that long-term crime prevention needs to offer other options, especially to young men in problem districts. There’s a new drive targeting “vulnerable” areas in Utrecht, and projects such as working with the “top 600″ criminals and their families in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, international efforts have been led by the mayors of Rotterdam and Belgian Antwerp — where a record 90 tonnes of smuggled cocaine was found last year. They have visited South American counterparts and lobbied governments to ramp up international efforts against organised crime, increase barriers in harbours, and confiscate criminal assets.

In Rotterdam, there are promising signs of public-private cooperation, with busts by the multi-agency HARC, a new Information Sharing Centre, a business integrity initiative, and a “training container” to coach harbour staff in combatting corruption. A long-awaited law banning civilians from the container area is in place to help apprehend those vital ‘collectors’ picking up drugs from containers, while Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb is also enforcing a €2,250 anti-nuisance penalty. The new Dutch coalition hopes to add to these initiatives. It will start investing specifically in combating crime that “undermines” public order from 2023, ratcheting up to a €100m yearly investment by 2025. In the meantime, the last budget put aside an extra €434m to increase annual budgets for police, judicial organisation and subversive crime prevention, though experts warn that money must not be used to add to the layers of bureaucracy.

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Instead, some want a shift in public attitudes on drug taking: as the prosecutor said in the torture container trial, show users the “abhorrent” consequence of their habits rather than perpetuating the permissive, hippy culture of the Seventies. “It’s not done in the Netherlands to point in the direction of drug users,” says Belleman. “If you don’t use drugs, there’s no market. But people who use cocaine at the weekends don’t make the connection between organised crime and their drug use — and if you tell them, they are really offended.”

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, lies in how to prosecute those alleged criminals who are caught. In the mega-Marengo trial, hearings are currently mired in details such as whether the co-chief suspect Saïd Razzouki left his reading glasses behind when he was extradited from Colombia in December, and whether due process was followed in his subpoena.

The accused in the trial deny the charges, and Schouten doesn’t expect a verdict until 2023. “This trial is under an enormous amount of pressure,” he says. “This is about the rule of law, the dyke against injustice, and we must continue to protect this. But there is a lot of fear.” Even when the trial verdict is reached, until words turn to action, that fear is unlikely to go away.

On one of the last nights before the festival kicked off, I insisted on going to Film Forum to see Todd Haynes’s documentary The Velvet Underground. I was excited: it was the first film I’d see in weeks, as my life had gone from one of watching films to one of begging filmmakers to sign contracts — and the documentary had been praised far and wide as “exhilarating… experimental” (AV Club), “rapturous” (Slate), and “as radical, daring, and brilliant, as the band itself” (Rolling Stone).

And it’s true: I was exhilarated. I was sold when the first notes of Venus in Furs began to play, thumping almost painfully loudly in the butter-scented dark of the theatre. I was sold when Lou Reed’s beautiful young face appeared in Chelsea Girls-style split-screen, flickering with the slight human movements that Warhol couldn’t stamp out even with his commands not to move. I was sold on the hypnagogic, Brakhage-inspired collages splicing together 16mm film at that dizzying pace where impression exceeds memory. It made me think about how beautiful time is, how beautiful existence is, how beautiful youth is. As K. Austin Collins wrote in Rolling Stone, “[t]he movie makes you wish you were there”.

But I’m not sure it’s true that, as Collins continues, with the “lights darkened, [and the] dots and rays and Reed flickering before us, we nearly are”. When the lights lifted, I was there in a chair in a city overrun by private equity and a sense of impending collapse, waiting for people in their fifties to collect their bags and exit to the restrooms.

All the reviews talk about how the film isn’t a traditional narrative documentary, telling you the story of the band. Instead, it makes you “experience… feel… in your gut”. The film, then, is nothing more than a vibe. The only real impression it leaves you with is that The Velvet Underground was cool. And it was cool. They look cool, even today, in those videos with the polka dots projected on them, the hot people dancing in all the leather. Lou Reed and John Cale still look beautiful, young and sombre under Warhol’s camera. Unlike, say, The Pixies, they’re not lame at all.

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And yet this isn’t quite as radical a documentary as reviews would have it. As one reviewer put it, there are interviews that “offer commentary and insight, alternating between taking a detached ‘long view’ of things and plunging us into the middle of it all”. In other words, there are normal talking-head interviews, even though they’re in square aspect ratio and even though they’re projected in split-screen and even though they’re filmed by Ed Lachman.

And you know what? It’s not fun to see members of the Factory as 65 year olds. Cultural documentary, I’m starting to think, is always fundamentally sad. It’s always a memento mori. Music is about youth and beauty, but this film can’t escape a stultifying sense of impending death, even in a “fun” version that seems mostly to prove that Todd Haynes is familiar with structuralist film. The problem with documentary is that everyone hates documentary: that’s why all the truly original ones are affronts to the genre; they are anti-recreative and experimental (Shoah, The Killing Fields, etc.). Even usually brilliant and original directors fall flat when they turn to documentary, churning out depressingly normal, depressingly obvious work (see Jim Jarmusch’s Gimme Danger, an Iggy Pop documentary complete with titles in Creeper font).

The problem of documentary, its vampire problem, is worse with music. Music is about people between the ages of 15 and 30 being incredibly cool — and Sixties cool, especially, is about youth and freshness and limits. That’s why Haynes doesn’t continue past the break-up of the band: because it’s not cool that they didn’t die, because it was lame when Green Day came out with American Idiot in 2004, because no one wanted to see Billie Joel Armstrong wearing eyeliner in his thirties.

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As the film discusses, Warhol would project his work at 16 frames per second, a third slower than life. The people here seem ghostly, slowed down, plugged into a museum-like circuit, one where the individual is transformed from flesh to symbol, from transient to uncontainable. The same change makes a person cool. Coolness, celebrity, is all about some area halfway between presence and absence.

One of the highlights of the film is seeing Jonathan Richman meet the band as a 15 year old, and hearing the 2019 Richman exclaim that he thought “These people would understand me!” That’s how you always feel about your idols; like there’s someone a little far away, a few years old, a little bit skinnier, who knows.

So you don’t want to see them grow up. You don’t want them to get married and have kids and buy a house. You don’t want them to survive. You don’t want them to get normal.

At one point in the movie, Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian filmmaker, talks about the zeitgeist of the Sixties, the movie houses of Midtown, and the New York Film Festival, all bristling with avant-garde experiment and energy. It’s hard to imagine a time when the New York Film Festival was interesting. Today, an exciting NYFF film is The Velvet Underground, a film by an old person about old people for old people. And what’s left for us? For days after watching the film, I listened to ‘Heroin’ over and over again, struck again by the pain of it, by the screechiness and hurt.

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In comparison, all young people have today are Instagram memes and videos and a sense of irony so deep that until that film festival I was working on actually happened, most people thought it was all a joke. It was beautiful and triumphant, and two days after it ended, our creative director, a “meme lord”, an innocent child who had been working in an ice cream shop in Florida and living with his mom until he got scouted and brought to New York in July, overdosed, and I found out he was dead from seeing his dead body on my Instagram feed. His ex-boyfriend has posted the photo, announcing his death and asking if anyone knew how to contact his family.

Again, almost everyone thought it was a joke, and no one had his family’s address. No one knew if he had siblings. No one even knew how old he was; I could vaguely remember a conversation where he’d told me he was either one or two years older than he said he was, because even being 25 was terrifyingly old. Because to be cool, you have to die, you have to disappear. The heroin has to actually kill you.

Understand this imperishable fact and it becomes clear how the country fell so quickly to the Taliban over recent weeks.

The Afghan poppy has been an economic and political force for almost 150 years. As James Tharin Bradford explains in Poppies, Politics, and Power, its modern state was built in the late 1800s “in the shadow of poppy production”. But the emergence of the international drug control regime in the early 20^th century saw opium production banned. Afghanistan could no longer legally sell drugs, and as a result it lost a major source of state income as well as control over many of its rural areas, which relied on opium to survive and just carried on producing it regardless of the prohibition that Kabul was now obliged to enforce. For the first time the poppy came between the peripheries and central authority.

But then in 1979, the Soviets invaded — and opium production spiralled. The mujahedin that resisted Moscow needed cash to fight, and their make-up and available options meant they relied on two things: the rural economy and the global drug trade. Drug production may have remained illegal until 1992, but that didn’t stop Afghanistan becoming one of the most valuable opium suppliers in the world during the 1990s.

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Indeed, by 1999 the country produced 79% of the world’s illicit opium. Even when, a year later, the Taliban banned its production, it still accounted for 70%. Today, it remains the country’s most valuable cash crop worth $863 million, and the “industry” is the largest national employer with more than 500,000 people in the equivalent of full-time work.

Now that the Taliban are back, there are fears that Afghanistan’s drug production — which now also includes marijuana and increasingly methamphetamine — will explode. People are worried. “Taliban mulls flooding the West with heroin to shore up Afghan economy,” according to The Telegraph. What next?

It is important to understand what the Taliban is not: it is not a drug cartel and Afghanistan was never the narco-insurgency or state of popular imagination. The group’s views on opium are almost as variegated as the Talibs themselves. Some will tell you that Opium is haram, forbidden. The Taliban banned its production in 2000 on the grounds that it was not Islamic (though political motives were probably more important). But Islam can be flexible, if necessary. Even its most ardent commandants have a surprising amount of wiggle room; for example, if you’re starving, you can even permissibly consume the “donkey you cannot eat” (the pig).

Similarly for the Taliban, matters of religion — though never the fundamentals — can be shaped according to the economic and political realities on the ground. It is this ability that informs how they deal with opium, and, therefore, what is likely to come to Afghanistan, its neighbours and perhaps the West. It also explains how the group took control so quickly and what will characterise their rule if they are to hold on.

In Afghanistan, power does not automatically stem from the state — it is negotiated and bargained for. The nature of these negotiations is complex because they differ depending on the social, geographical and economic terrain of Afghanistan, which is incredibly varied. To rule there you must manage this problem by negotiating effectively. While former President Ashraf Ghani sat in Kabul trying to nation-build by spreadsheet and hanging out on Google Meets, the Talibs were out in the villages talking to who mattered and ladling out cash. It is this that enabled them to charge through Afghanistan without much resistance. They didn’t really defeat the Afghan army; they just made lots of deals.

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The mountains and rural areas — especially in the poppy-growing southwest of the country — are the constituencies that anyone who wants to govern must get on-side. It is not an easy task. As David Mansfield, an international expert on opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and the author of A State Built on Sand, points out: these are tough people who will resist the interference of outsiders — including those in government in Kabul. “They do not like being told what to do,” he tells me. “Push them too hard and they will react. The Taliban has had to consolidate their position within those rural communities over time — which means respecting their economic interests” — integral to which is the poppy. Given the choice, there is no choice: opium farming is their default setting.

This had egregious consequences for effective central governance over the past 20 years. Take the case of the southern district of Nangarhar. Both Washington and Kabul were obsessed with building the Afghan National Army (ANA) as a means of securing the state and promoting national unity. Salaries were good, recruitment was aggressive. Mansfield explained to me that for every year that poppy production was banned from 2001 to the present day, more sons from the poppy-growing southern districts swelled the ranks of the ANA and the police.

The local Talibs were upset; they hassled people. But they always got the same response: “We have no love for the army or the state. My son will gladly leave the ANA tomorrow, but you will need to pay his salary — it supports our family.” It’s not that the farmers were especially loyal to the Taliban. They just disliked a government that wouldn’t let them farm and had no interest in dialogue or respecting their way of life — which, of course, left the path clear for someone who would do both.

So what did the Taliban do? They couldn’t kill everyone. Once again, they made deals. Sons could come back from the army to visit their towns and villages — but not in uniform and only at night. And, yes, ok: the villagers could grow poppies once again to earn money that way instead. This is what has been happening all these years. Negotiations and compromises like these — in a variety of forms — took place across the country and is just one reason why the ANA collapsed so quickly, and why the provinces did not resist the Taliban.

Now they are back in power. It seems unlikely the Taliban will risk alienating an important community based around an industry that some of their commanders have healthy financial interests in to boot. And even if the Talibs wanted to ban opium production they know it would not work. “Theoretically they can prohibit it, but that doesn’t mean they can control it,” says Mansfield. Then there are the political considerations: start your reign by giving orders that people ignore and watch the veneer of power crumble.

But what about after they have consolidated their hold on things? Once again, it depends. Right now, the price of opium is low. It doesn’t make much economic sense to start wide-scale production in the face of international opposition. Right now, the Taliban is still consolidating its power and — rhetorically at least — seeking relations with as many countries (Israel excepted) as possible. At the very least it makes sense not to alienate everyone immediately. But of course, if the economy collapses, if job in cities disappear and government jobs become fewer, not to mention the end of the multiplier effects of the aid economy as NGOs flee alongside Western powers, then things might look very different.

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And there is something else, too. An ODI report last month found that funding from international donors to Afghanistan’s remote provinces has been small, compared with the trade in legal and illegal goods that happens mostly off-the-books. In the southwestern Nimroz province, for example, money from Kabul amounts to about $20 million annually, whereas informal “taxation” from smuggling and other illegal activities raises about $235 million annually.

Crucially, as the authors note, “after the withdrawal of US and allied troops, money becomes the main instrument available to international partners during negotiations”. Simply put, cash is the only leverage we might have over the Taliban in future. But with so many hidden sources of it circulating, it could turn out to be not very much leverage at all. The Taliban could well prove to be beyond Western influence. If the group decides to sanction opium production once more, who will stop them?

Whatever happens, it will be informed not by international opinion but what the Afghans negotiate — or fail to — among themselves. Whether in the 1800s or the 1990s or the last 20 years of Western occupation, those who control Kabul do not control the periphery. As Mansfield concludes, “those in Kabul have to tread carefully. The provinces may be unruly, but they have their own way of doing things as everyone who has tried to govern over the last 40 years has discovered to their cost.”

Almost 20 years ago, Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference that 90% of the drugs sold on British streets came from Afghanistan. He was looking for an excuse to invade, of course — but Afghan heroin had been a problem for Britain, and the world, for decades. We have reversed into the future. Once again it is not only the Taliban the West must now worry about in Afghanistan, but also the poppy — and the power it wields across the world.

These deaths are the predictable result of political failure. For decades, politicians have been hooked on prohibition. They have pushed the idea that use of illicit drugs should be punished and persisted with suggestions they can stifle flows of heroin, cocaine and cannabis, rather than accepting there is strong demand and focusing on harm reduction. The absurdity of their stance is exposed by the failure to keep even top-security prisons free of drugs, while on the streets prices fall, purity rises and new synthetic drugs arrive. This is, after all, a country with 11,000 miles of coast that sees 500m tonnes of goods a year move through its ports — yet total annual consumption of cocaine could fit in a solitary shipping container.

The legacy of such political irresponsibility is seen in these grim fatality figures. Our leaders outsourced the drug markets to criminal gangs, which rely on violence and grooming of young recruits to dominate their lucrative trade. There is, of course, no quality control on the content or strength of their wares. So forget all that Tory talk of levelling up, given the devastating impact of these policies on poorer parts of society. In England, the highest rate of fatalities is found in the north east, three times higher than further down the coast before the pandemic. In Scotland, epicentre for this whirlwind of misery, hospitalisation rates for drug-related incidents are reportedly 16 times higher in low-income areas than more prosperous parts.

The data is even more dispiriting when you probe prohibitionist policies. It is 50 years since signing of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which banned possession, supply, manufacture, import and export of controlled drugs — arguably the most damaging piece of legislation passed by parliament in recent decades. Since then, the number of heroin users in England and Wales has risen 25-fold, according to analysis by Transform Drug Policy Foundation, while drug-related deaths have soared more than 30-fold. The fatality rate in Scotland is ten times the average across Europe — and it has more than doubled over the past five years. Half of our homicides are also linked to drugs (along with half the acquisitive crimes and rough sleepers).

Could there be a more damning indictment of failure than all these corpses? Yet politicians cut support for treatment centres, pushed abstinence and kept pandering to fear with disastrous consequences. In Scotland, much of the rise in fatalities is down to use of benzodiazepines. Media hysteria led to tightening of the rules on legal prescriptions, which choked the supply routes for people abusing these drugs and thus incentivised criminals to develop the market for ultra-cheap, high-potency street benzos − the “blues” behind much of the horrifying carnage north of the border.

Or take events in parts of northern England after police targeted the cutting agents used by cocaine dealers to pad out their products and hike profits. Yes, this led to successful prosecutions of people found in illicit possession of large quantities of benzocaine, a mild anaesthetic used by dentists. But the result was simply a sharp rise in the purity of cocaine sold on the streets of places such as Manchester. Prices also plunged at the same time from about £45,000 a kilo to £30,000 a kilo, according to the charity Release, due to increased production in Latin America. This is close to half the £55,000 cost of a wholesale kilo 12 years ago on official figures, indicating significant rise in supplies.

“The drugs market is resilient and increased money for policing, increased busts and increased prosecutions do little to disrupt the trade,” said Niamh Eastwood, executive director of Release. “Even when borders have shut across the world in the pandemic it had little effect on the supply chains. This is a business that adapts fast, so as the government lauds the success of law enforcement closing down so-called county lines, new supply models are developed. We need new thinking, we need to start exploring decriminalisation and we need regulation of these substances.”

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By Charles Falconer

She is right. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure — as shown by the government’s own reports. These admit Britain has the highest number of cocaine and high-risk opioid users in Europe, disclosing that there has been rising cocaine use over the past decade with recent hikes “clear in most age groups” and purity at highest levels on record due to “increased availability’. A 2017 review of strategy revealed central government spent £1.6bn on enforcement, yet “drug seizures… had little impact on availability” although there were “potential unintended consequences…such as violence related to drug markets”.  Even the biggest of drug busts barely dent supplies or costs on the streets, as many cops will admit.

It is estimated the “harms” cost England an astonishing £19.3bn a year, mainly due to crime and health. Yet Boris Johnson, unveiling a package of rehashed crime policies last week to look strong for his red wall voters, misleads the public with continuing pretence that we can beat the “scourge” of drugs. His ministers talk of “tough law enforcement” and win headlines for “cracking down” on recreational use with more testing after arrests. They claim this will “challenge drug misuse, reduce demand and change the perceived acceptability of using illicit drugs”, while a cross-government summit will “drive down demand for illegal drugs”.

I doubt cartel bosses and drug barons are quaking with fear over Johnson’s drug bash. In truth, it is bordering on criminal to see politicians stick to their bungling stance as the death toll mounts. Yet there are signs that behind the tough talk, the state’s backfiring drug war stance is starting to crumble. Both Scottish and English governments are putting a bit more cash into treatment while two key parliamentary committees have called for drug decriminalisation. “We recommend a radical change in UK drugs policy from a criminal justice to a health approach,” said the health and social care committee. “A harm reduction approach would not only benefit those who are using drugs but reduce the costs for their wider communities.”

Many frustrated police forces, fed up with wasting resources, are simply pressing ahead with “diversion schemes”. Avon and Somerset, North Wales, Thames Valley and West Midlands were among the first to follow the successful lead of Durham in seeking to slash reoffending rates and save costs by offering drug education or treatment as an alternative to arrest, cautioning or prosecution for people caught in possession. At least eight more have followed suit, with Scotland among others developing schemes. “You could call this de facto decriminalisation,” said Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst for Transform. “But that word seems problematic for this government because of worries it is seen as being soft on drugs.”

Rolles pointed out, however, that these strategies are winning ministerial plaudits and were backed by this month’s Black review into drug strategies. But surely it is unacceptable to have a postcode lottery that sees one person caught with a small stash of drugs end up in prison with a criminal record, while another sits through talks learning about harm reduction? Not to mention the inflammatory racial bias seen in police stop and search efforts focused on drugs. “We need to stop people going to prison for drugs since it is the wrong place for those people with problems,” said Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser.

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Nutt was sacked in 2009 by the New Labour government for daring to tell the truth about cannabis, ecstasy and LSD being less harmful to public health than alcohol and tobacco. Since then, cheap potent, synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and mephedrone have arrived on our shores. But both big parties remain terrified of talking honestly to voters about drugs, although the few MPs breaking ranks have found the public in a more progressive place than they anticipated. Meanwhile there is increasing interest in Portugal, which 20 years ago this month showed a way out of the drug morass under the leadership of António Guterres, now United Nations secretary general.

Portugal acted out of desperation at a rising death toll. It had high levels of heroin use at the turn of the century, hundreds of deaths, highest rates of HIV infection in the European Union and prison cells filled with people sentenced for drug offences.

“It was almost impossible to find a family in Portugal that did not have drug-related problems,” said João Goulão, architect of their reforms. So they decriminalised drug possession, focused on health rather than punishment, shifted from abstinence-based campaigns and flipped funds into treatment. The result is shown in the latest annual data for drug-related deaths: 62 fatalities in a population twice the size of Scotland.

This is a spectacular turnaround. Now Portugal has among the lowest drug-related death rates in Europe, along with some of the lowest levels of use among younger generations. There is still a bedrock of high-risk opioid users, although numbers have fallen significantly and habits tend to be less problematic. It remains illegal to deal drugs. But those found with small quantities for personal use are sent before a local commission — typically a doctor, lawyer and social worker — to be told about support services. “We do not focus on drug problems but any issues people might have in their lives that lead to drug use,” said Goulão. “This is the key to our success. No one ends up in prison with a criminal record and stigma.”

Other countries have also seen the light, such as the Czech Republic and Spain. If Britain had followed similar policies, thousands of lives might have been saved. And these deaths should not be dismissed: they are a symbol of collective societal failures as well as a sign of lethal political stupidity. It has been shown time and again how the hallucination of prohibition can have perverse consequences by fuelling death, innovation and sales rather than depressing demand. So let us stop pretending another bust, another crackdown and another poor sod with mental health struggles being sent to prison is going to stop the use of drugs. Portugal shows there is a path forward that is cheaper, kinder and safer for everyone — as well as more honest about human nature. So why not level up with the electorate?

The way in which the wider United Kingdom metabolised the recent story of Scotland’s drugs deaths is a case in point. It emerged earlier this month that the country’s drug-related death toll is now 3.5 times that of England and Wales, and leads Europe by a shocking degree; in 2019 there were 1,264 drug-related deaths in the country of 5 million, roughly seven out of ten of whom were male.

The findings have proved a political scandal in Scotland, taking up numerous column inches and leading to the resignation of Joe Fitzpatrick, the SNP minister for Public Health, Sport and Wellbeing. In the rest of the UK the story has briefly touched the news agenda before melting away. It is admittedly a period of unusually feverish political drama, with a new strain of Covid-19 on the rampage and a Brexit deal in the balance until Christmas, but I don’t think that in other circumstances things would be any different. They never are. On my Twitter timeline, Scottish drug deaths — rather like the victims of Northern Irish paramilitary shootings and beatings — scarcely surface at all as a topic of serious concern among members of the London media and professional classes. Nor have they done so for many years.

There are a number of reasons for this, I think. One is that England has become used over the years to the insidious idea that what might be dubbed “Celtic dysfunction” is an immutable fact of life, a bit like the rain. This dysfunction, it is thought, is most often expressed through violence, abuse of alcohol or drugs, although occasionally it snakes into eloquence. At times it may become a topic of heightened cultural interest, as with Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting or Douglas Stuart’s recent Booker Prize winner Shuggie Bain, but that rarely translates into any sense of political urgency. When Scotland movingly or humorously dramatises its pain, the results are praised and savoured, but little sustained effort is made to alleviate the reality.

Along with devolution, another question has arisen: who owns this reality? In Westminster the attitude is that Scotland does, particularly with the SNP in charge: if they want to claim Scotland, the thinking goes, they can take responsibility for its human misery as well. But the truth is that neither Holyrood nor Westminster owns it fully: an effective drugs policy appears to have fallen down a gap in approaches between the two administrations. Where the British Government treats drug abuse primarily as a criminal justice matter, the Scottish Government increasingly regards it as a health emergency, leading to the Home Office blocking proposals for a “safe consumption” facility in Glasgow.

For drug users, the two opposing policies seem to represent either punishment or what might be called despair management. It may be that neither offers a satisfactory outcome. The Orwell prize-winning Scottish writer Darren McGarvey — who himself overcame addiction to drink and drugs — has eloquently argued that the punitive approach does not work and that a form of decriminalisation would give the authorities more policy options. But he also says that the SNP’s “harm reduction” model is itself flawed, and will lead to continued deaths: the SNP has actually cut drugs services and reduced spending on rehabilitation facilities, which are most likely to offer addicts a decisive path out of addiction.

There are no easy solutions, since many potential elements may feed into a drugs crisis: family dysfunction, economic deprivation, the easy availability of drugs, the fragmentation of community, a history of criminal offending, a spiral of shame and the individual’s sense of his or her own loss of meaning in the world.

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Will anyone ever say 'sorry' in Northern Ireland?

By Jenny McCartney

A large amount of what holds true for Scotland also seems to be reflected in my birthplace of Northern Ireland, which itself has sharply escalating numbers of drug-related deaths. As in Scotland, the greater proportion of such deaths are among men, and many involve the mixing of a number of different substances. Those living in the most deprived areas of Northern Ireland — with their additional history of Troubles-related losses — are five times as likely to die a drug-related death as those in wealthier parts, and around 70% of those deaths will be among men. A separate but linked phenomenon is the relatively high rate of suicide in both places (although some of Northern Ireland’s suicides have recently been recategorised as accidental drugs deaths). The group most vulnerable to suicide across the board in the UK is that of middle-aged men.

Is there any truth in the notion that a predisposition to drink, drugs or even despair is a notable streak of the communal psyche of Scotland or Northern Ireland in a way that is less pronounced elsewhere? To say so is to run the risk of overlooking societal factors, or romanticising sadness. Some of the characteristics that seem innate may in fact be cultural and historical. Both Glasgow and Belfast, for example, once had heavy industries — in particular ship-building — that provided stable employment, rewarded engineering skills, and to some extent defined masculine meaning. When such industries melted away, they left a hole in working-class communities which nothing in successive generations has adequately filled. Women, too, have had to navigate the wider consequences of this loss, not least its damaging effects on the men around them.

The prevailing religious culture in both places, too, put a particularly strong emphasis on personal responsibility and hard work — both important values, but if one then repeatedly lapses from them, the internalised sense of shame is especially acute. The drug addict is often presented as someone who is essentially feckless, irresponsible and selfish. Yet it might be truer to say that while addiction makes addicts behave in a selfish way, the spur to the addiction is often deeply rooted in feeling too much rather than too little: the shameful sense in moments of lucidity of being worthless and unlovable, and of having routinely disappointed friends and family in a manner that now seems irrecoverable. The pain demands a quickly palliative measure, which when it wears off is likely to intensify the source of pain.

I spent some time a couple of years ago interviewing male teenaged victims of post-ceasefire paramilitary shootings and beatings in Belfast, attacks in which they had almost died and from which they were permanently scarred. Some had been targeted by the local “hard men” for their alleged involvement in petty crime, including small-time involvement with drugs. They were now almost certainly self-medicating more often to dull their anxieties, not least in constant anticipation of their attackers returning.

They displayed a remarkable lack of self-pity, in part because it was a pointless emotion, since there was and is very little coherent political will or strategy to help them rebuild their lives. Aside from a few brave community workers and academics who regularly speak up on their behalf, and their own families, there is almost no meaningful wider support shown to them. In the vast majority of cases they are too intimidated to consider giving evidence against their attackers in a public prosecution.

One spoke of a friend who had taken his own life after an attack of unimaginable brutality. Another told me he was fine now, and then casually mentioned that he had tried to kill himself on the night of his own engagement party. These youths were trapped within layers of indifference, both local and national, and immobilised in policy failure. I imagine that, albeit for less immediately brutal reasons, much the same sense of being officially considered either a non-person or a public nuisance applies to many of those who lose their lives to drugs in Scotland. The prevailing narrative around them is not one of empathy or outrage but ennui.

The by-products of stress and tension are not always wholly negative, provided there is at least some place in society where one seems to matter. Some of the wittiest people I have known — both men and women — have had extremely difficult childhoods. Their self-preservation demanded an enhanced attentiveness to the world, including the ability to closely  observe the innately unreliable adults and situations around them. Humour became a way both of detaching from emotional hurt and translating it into a usable currency: the dark, quick wit that so often characterises working-class Belfast and Glaswegian banter frequently has its origins in discomfort of some sort, whether outside the family or within it. The Glaswegian comedian Billy Connolly, for example, was only four years old when his mother abandoned him and his beloved older sister Flo to the erratically cruel care of paternal aunts and his father’s physical and sexual abuse.

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As an adult, talking about the abuse, Connolly revealed an extraordinary ability to sift and separate elements in his father’s character: “I love his memory now, as much as I loved him when he was alive. It was disloyal of him to do that to me, but there were other aspects of him that were great.” This heightened alertness to the agonising complications of others — the perpetually shifting, layered quality of the world — can be a great asset to a comedian or writer. But early betrayals also create an abiding reservoir of pain, into which people can pour drink or drugs or eventually their whole selves.

Connolly recognised this about himself in time to give up alcohol and cocaine, while holding on to the humour like a life-raft. Others don’t. One certainly would not wish the darker aspects of Billy Connolly’s childhood on anyone, but the question remains: would he have been the same electric stage presence had he grown up in a gently nurturing, stable middle-class family in Surrey?

Probably not. Yet the fact that dysfunction can give rise to compelling humour or art should not be a reason for a complacent failure to address it in policy terms. For every Billy Connolly or Douglas Stuart — who manage by means of resilience, talent, hard work and luck to alchemise their early adversity — there are numerous others who will be entirely crushed by it.

Another factor, I think, now mitigates against effective action on both drug-related deaths and suicides in Scotland in particular, and the wider UK in general, even as the statistics climb. It is the current style of political discourse, especially in sections of the Left, which accords moral status to victimhood while becoming increasingly selective about who is granted that status. If the wrong “category members” knock on the door, they’ll often find that the empathy police have quietly closed the club.

At present, public discussion of disadvantage often emphasises necessary questions of race and gender while simultaneously underplaying those of class, familial care, education and poverty. This is partly because the online public conversation around disadvantage — like many public conversations — is often dominated by the middle and upper-middle classes, a large proportion of whom have little personal experience of poverty or class discrimination, for example, and tend to minimise the importance of these factors in determining life chances. The most disadvantaged people in society often aren’t making their voices heard in the argument at all: they’re too busy struggling, and sometimes failing, to get by.

In much of academic and social media discourse, “white men” are routinely glued to the top of the privilege tree — somewhat illogically, since without further qualification the category can encompass both a homeless, unemployed person and Jeff Bezos. As an automatic shorthand for privilege, however, it doesn’t really work, especially once geography and socio-economic class are factored in. It will certainly include a notably high proportion of those in both the drug-related deaths and suicide statistics: seven out of ten drug-related deaths in Scotland are among men (including all races, of course, but at the last census Scotland was 96% white.)

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Despite much cultural discussion of race, the prevailing policy direction is doing very little to help less well-off black and Asian men across the UK either. Those social problems which are male-dominated (although of course they affect women as well) are also those to which society is increasingly unsympathetic. Budgets for drug and alcohol treatment programmes have been widely cut in recent years.

Men in the UK have roughly three times the suicide rate of women. According to the Samaritans, men who are less well-off (defined as a household income of less than £17,500 a year) are up to ten times more likely to take their own lives than those who are better-off. We need to talk about this, just as we acknowledge that women are disproportionately victims of domestic violence.

These are grim statistics of a brutal epidemic of self-destruction and loss, and it is striking how little they feature in the broader national conversation. Devolved responsibilities, shame around deprivation and addiction, institutional indifference and the oddly skewed prism through which once-progressive movements now view privilege and victimhood, have combined to make male despair increasingly invisible, even as it mounts: somebody else’s problem, and nobody’s problem at all.

This wave of assaults last week marked the end of phase one of  ‘Project Python’, a previously-secret mission to confront one of Mexico’s most terrifying drug cartels. It led to the capture of more than 600 people linked to the gang. “They promise hope and they deliver despair,” one Drug Enforcement Administration official told a receptive journalist. Agents boasted they’d seized 20,000 kilograms of drugs along with $22m in cash and other assets.

Their target had been the Jalisco New Generation (JNG) cartel, a gang that stands out for its hideous savagery even by the debased standards of the Mexican drug war. It is led by Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Cervantes, a former police officer with a $10m bounty on his head, whose bodyguards once shot down a military helicopter to prevent his arrest. His moustachioed face stares down from billboards across California, as the authorities appeal for help in re-capturing a shadowy figure once jailed for three years in San Francisco on drug charges.

This highly-disciplined character leads a group that has used appalling violence to become probably the world’s key trafficker of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine and crystal meth; it controls at least one-third of the lucrative United States market. Using extortion, kidnapping, torture and murder it has muscled in on several other key sectors of the Mexican economy, from farming to mining — as I saw for myself last month, while visiting the state of Michoacán.

Cervantes was born here 54 years ago, one of six boys in a poor family of avocado farmers. I was there to report on how the drug cartels have muscled on production of the fruit as a new source of cash. Initially, they used avocado farming as a way to launder their mountains of money, but soon found it had become as lucrative as heroin, thanks to growing demand from Western consumers. Mexico grows almost half the avocados sold globally — and most of its ‘green gold’ comes from Michoacán.

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This fertile state was already at the core of cartel operations. I was staying in Uruapan, home to a club where five decapitated heads were rolled across the dance floor in 2006, in a move which kick-started Mexico’s war on drugs. The day I arrived, 11 bodies were found in a shallow grave. The following day, as I walked to my hotel, I stumbled across the scene of a mass shooting that had left nine teenagers dead. Soon after my departure, another farmer was kidnapped from his avocado orchard and killed, then 24 more corpses were discovered nearby with several of them showing signs of torture.

It is like the Wild West. Farmers speak of being extorted, indigenous people are armed with semi-automatic weapons to protect forests, trucks are hijacked daily and even taco sellers pay protection money. One journalist described fleeing the country after being summoned by a cartel chief who said he would pay $50,000 a month to have his public image improved. Vigilantes ran one town, boasting of having 2,000 weapons to protect 15,000 people. Police are distrusted since many are in the pay of cartels. Yet corruption is complex: as one source explained to me, often officers don’t have any choice, since if they refuse to help the gangs they — or their children — are killed.

The beautiful but brutalised state depicts with stark clarity the impact of the global war on drugs. Uruapan is in the midst of a vicious struggle for supremacy between JNG and a local cartel called Los Viagras (so called after the spikily-erect hair of one of its founders). Last year, the Jalisco mob strung up nine bodies from a bridge alongside a banner threatening Los Viagras, with 10 more corpses — many dismembered — left on the road below in a macabre show of force. To fight them is to attempt to cut heads off a hydra, as local leaders shift loyalties and new groups spring up. One source sent me a list of 20 different gangs contesting the terrain while the state’s security director told me the cartels have 200,000 members in Michoacán alone.

This huge figure puts the US arrest of 750 JNG goons in grim perspective. Now consider the cause of this spiralling violence in Mexico, which last year left 35,000 people dead in its worst year for murder since records began. For the emergence of this cartel highlights how criminal gangs descend into increasing barbarity as they battle to control illicit markets. JNG has filled a void left by the capture of Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, which weakened his powerful Sinaloa cartel. Typical of their depraved tactics was an incident five years ago in which dynamite was taped to a man and his son, then detonated — with the execution filmed on the sicario’s phone.

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The unintended consequence of taking out Guzman, who was jailed in the US last year, was the ending of a period of comparative peace that one analyst called ‘Pax Sinaloa’. His removal unleashed a fight for supremacy in which someone even more sinister seems to have triumphed —namely El Mencho, who oversees smuggling operations today on every continent.

The escalation of violence is a familiar story. We have seen the same thing here in Britain. Neil Woods, a former undercover cop, detailed in two superb books how risking his life for public safety made minimal impact on stopping the flow of drugs. He witnessed over his career a spiral of savagery as crooks fought to control the trade, the spoils of victory going to the most violent among them.

This partly explains the disturbing rise in knife crime in Britain, which in turn is associated with county line supply models that exploit vulnerable children to sell drugs. Politicians, though, continue to push the same old failed drug polices, which only inflame the violence — from Manchester to Mexico.

Meanwhile, we are seeing a surge in stronger synthetic drugs which are harder to detect and can be more dangerous. History has shown how prohibition fosters potency, from the days of moonshine replacing beer a century ago in the US through to skunk replacing milder cannabis more recently on our streets. Stronger products mean smaller quantities for smuggling and bigger margins. It is noticeable that JNG first emerged from Jalisco, Mexico’s centre for such products. Now, this gang is trafficking vast quantities of methamphetamine and fentanyl across the US, where the drugs are fuelling homelessness and addiction.

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Ironically, one reason these cartels moved into avocados is the recent fall in the price of heroin due to the emergence of new rivals, especially in Asia. Another reason has been the legalisation of cannabis in Canada, parts of the US and, effectively, in Mexico, which has cut off another supply of illegal cash. But this shift has happened too late to stop the cartels from becoming so strong they have corroded their country. And in any case the rise in the synthetic drug demand is filling that gap. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a veteran socialist and close friend of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, won power two years ago by promising to end violence with focus on the economy and a policy of “abrazos, no balazos“ (hugs not bullets). But the economy has stagnated, despite the avocado boom, and violence worsened.

Uttam Dhillon, acting head of the DEA, boasted after the raids last week that his team had carried out “one of the largest, concentrated actions against a single criminal organisation in many years”. He argued that the arrests would have “significant impact” since they were inhibiting the cartel’s ability “to regenerate and to continue to threaten our communities with their deadly drugs”. It’s nonsense. He should listen to his own agents who say that El Mencho is a far more deadly foe than his predecessors with his extreme use of terror and violence — and he should question why the murder and mayhem grows worse for all the DEA’s noble efforts.

However, as is often the case, he succumbed to the curious allure of the substance he was peddling: heroin.

“Are you not aware of the damage the drug causes?” I ask, perhaps glibly, keen to hear how he now justifies selling the drug to vulnerable people, like young mothers and the homeless. He pauses briefly, locating what, to him at least, feels like an appropriate, face-saving response: “I never took heroin until I was 27. I went through a heavy withdrawal.”

The withdrawal associated with heroin and, indeed, all opiates, is brutal and unforgiving. Indeed, the phrase “kicking-the-habit” refers to the physical agony of going cold-turkey, where addicts become emotionally and physically excruciated as the substance makes its long, painful retreat from their tortured minds and bodies, forcing them to kick-out involuntarily, as if convulsing.

Serious heroin addicts with a high tolerance for the drug become trapped in the hellish cycle of scoring drugs to escape withdrawal symptoms, which isn’t cheap. This is why criminality becomes a necessity for many.

This bone-chilling fear of withdrawal trumps the shame of social exclusion, the indignity of prison and the permanence of death. The need to pursue the next fix, at the cost of all else, leaves many drug-abusers physically and morally disfigured.

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By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Only when contending with that reality, does my 50-year-old drug-dealing friend’s rationalisation for peddling smack sound a little more believable. Having gone through a ‘rattle’ — slang for withdrawal — he, in his own words, “knew how much these people needed it”.

It’s broad-daylight in the heart of this bustling post-industrial community. Another two men loiter behind a pair of battered phone-boxes which partly shield them from the glare of a busy high street. They’re here to score. It’s not even tea-time and nobody anywhere is battling an eye-lid. The police-station round the corner will close shortly, not that it will make a difference. Here, even the cops have all but accepted that drugs and their attendant miseries are inevitable.

Scotland has a proud pioneering history. We brought the world antibiotics, telecommunications and a paradigm-shifting enlightenment. But we also lead the way in delusional hubris, and finger-pointing. In Scotland our successes are our own, but our failures — and they are many — are usually someone else’s fault. And by far the greatest blemish on our storied history in recent times is the collective abandonment of the most vulnerable, persecuted and excluded group in our society: drug-addicts.

Data recently published has revealed that in Scotland, drug-related deaths rose by a shameful 27% last year to 1,187. That means the death-toll in Scotland was equivalent to five Lockerbie bombings or fifty 7/7s. It is nearly three times that of the UK as a whole, and, per capita, the drug death rate in Scotland is higher than that of the U.S. Yet no national emergency has been declared.

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In 1996, an e-coli outbreak, which affected 200 people and caused 21 deaths, led to a public inquiry which produced a damning report placing blame on a Wishaw butcher and council health officials. But in 2019, with tens-of-thousands hooked on drugs and 1,187 dead last year, there is quite simply no accountability. The buck stops nowhere.

In Scotland, the drug-problem is now out of control. Much like a fire that leaps from one structure to another, it has taken on a life of its own. It is now self-sustaining, independent of the conditions that caused it.

And the cause has baffled many. Myself included. It may be attributable to a number of factors, including the sharp managed-decline of the industries around which many working-class communities formerly cohered. The mechanisms by which they once lifted themselves out of poverty were sacrificed on the altar of the free-market and replaced with Frankie and Benny’s, American-style shopping malls, casinos and, in Dundee (the drug-death capital) a world-leading design museum — partly funded by the billionaires implicated in the U.S. opioid crisis.

Drug-related deaths, like untreated disease and violence, beget drug-related deaths. Much like flowers that drop seeds before wilting, those who perish in such sordid, undignified and often terrifying ways, don’t serve as warnings to others; instead, they become martyrs of sorts. They are mourned, not just by their families, but by those they with whom they sought and used the drugs that killed them.

Opiates such as heroin, diazepam, methadone and morphine are implicated, but by far the most consequential development in recent years has been the rise of counterfeit versions of prescription benzodiazepines, such as etizolam (street Valium) as well as cheap, deadly imitations of the popular American anti-anxiety drug, Xanax.

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My theory is that the drug problem is worse in Scotland for the same reason the drink, cigarette and life-expectancy problems are worse: the severity of deindustrialisation was that much more acute north of the border because we lacked the political autonomy to mitigate its impact in context-specific ways. Then again, I’m not an academic. Maybe it’s just the weather that’s killing everyone.

A compounding factor is the panic that grips those communities of drug-users who can’t go a day-or-two without hearing another story about someone who’s died. Thanks to a largely useless mainstream media (with a few notable exceptions), drug-abusers are invariably portrayed as vulgar, selfish and feckless individuals, whose problems are entirely self-generated. The notion that they may actually care about each other and, indeed, take care of one another, has thus far, eluded the public conscience. But drug-takers survive by moving in tight-knit communities, bonded by the acute and constant social-exclusion they endure.

Every time one addict is found dead, the others grieve. They sense too that they might be next. They feel that society has all but abandoned them. Socially excluded, bastardised by the public and misunderstood by many who wish to help them, what is there to live for? And so they do what we all do when terrible things happen: they reach for whatever numbs the pain. And so the fire spreads, tearing through entire families and communities, leaving death and despair in its wake.

Back on the street corner, as the men candidly regale me with their tales of drug addiction, the self-abuser in me begins to feel nostalgic about my past drug-use — a sign of the insanity that defines the condition of addiction. I drift into a day-dream about that half Temazepam from years ago, that I should have just swallowed before the police got their hands on me. “What a waste”, I think to myself, able to recall its sweet taste and chalky texture in my mouth.

Also known as benzos, eggs, norries, rugby balls, vallies, moggies, mazzies, roofies or downers, tranquilisers came in different forms. One was a small egg-shaped pill, soft to touch, not dissimilar to the texture of a Kiwi fruit. The other, a thick, white, chalky tablet.

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They start to take effect between about 20 and 40 minutes after swallowing, at which point a euphoric lethargy washes through mind and body. You are not tired, but should you close your eyes, you would appear to be asleep. Falling asleep after the drug has taken hold, though, would be a terrible waste of its pleasant effects.

Staying awake is also important because it can be terribly hard to wake up out of a tranquilised sleep. And physically getting up is quite the chore. Limbs are heavy against whichever surface you are rested upon. A hard floor becomes a soft bed.

The constant physical tensions you often mistake as natural mannerisms (a furrowing brow, a tapping toe, or an incessant nail-picking finger) begin to leave the body, joining an exodus of unintentional scowls, facial twitches and stomach butterflies. You feel heavy, but the extra weight is offset by your lack of desire to move.

Should you wish to speak, you may notice your voice is noticeably quieter — not because it is being suppressed, but because it returns to its natural level; it is no longer inhibited by the physical stress placed on the voice-box, which so often modulates the tone and volume of your speech. Words come a little easier, especially for those who struggle to make conversation because they second guess themselves.

You listen more actively and are usually more considered and sensitive in your response. It’s hard to know if it improves how you communicate, or whether you are just less concerned about communicating badly. You may also suddenly feel capable of articulating precisely that which you so often struggle to express. Words that have failed, eluded and embarrassed you, become your keen and humble affiliates – or perhaps this is a lack of concern for how much nonsense you are really talking.

These are called tranquilisers for a good reason. They induce a peace, serenity and sense of well-being that is difficult for even the most prolific and articulate drug-abusers to describe.

To the uninitiated, such a drug may hold an alluring curiosity. “How do the dealers come up with this stuff?” you may ask. But this drug is not the vulgar concoction of illicit dealers, it is a pharmaceutical-grade, state-approved chemical-compound. And one which was so widely prescribed by GPs in the Nineties, that addicts have been chasing its effects ever since.

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That’s why, even though drug-abuse is so often framed as an issue for the feckless individual, we must also consider why and how these substances are created — and how thoughtlessly (and sometimes malignantly) they are introduced into society.

What risk-assessments were undertaken before drugs such as methadone, diazepam and tranquillisers were introduced through the NHS? Beyond the risk-benefit analysis on the individuals being legally prescribed them, what other factors were taken into consideration? When drugs are road-tested for approval, their broader social-implications are rarely contemplated.

There is a long-established pattern of drugs being developed and introduced into society through pharmacies and healthcare-systems before later being withdrawn because of their negative social impact. An impact which cannot be predicted when the chemicals are tested on rabbits and rats.

In 1895, for example, the German drug manufacturer Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine (an opiate) as an over-the-counter cough-suppressant under the brand-name Heroin. Yes, you read that correctly. Heroin was developed as a morphine substitute but despite being marketed as “non-addictive” it wasn’t long before it scored some the highest rates of addiction among those who used it.

Fast-forward to the opioid crisis in the United States where over-prescription more than 30 years ago claimed the lives of over 200,000 Americans between 1999 and 2016. The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population but currently accounts for 80% of all opioid use. Again, those communities devastated by 21^st-century deindustrialisation are the ones more adversely affected – with the opioid-crisis rising sharply in the period of economic-decline between 2001 and 2009.

Where the U.S. led, Scotland followed. Research published by Scottish Universities in 2018 found that 18% of the Scottish population was prescribed at least one opioid painkiller in 2012 and that “there were four times more prescriptions for strong opioids dispensed to people in the most deprived areas, than to those in the most affluent areas”. Every bit of data available points to a large increase in the prescription of addictive painkillers like co-codamol and tramadol over the last 10-years in the very communities where people are dying.

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The drug-crisis may be framed as an issue about dangerous cocktails of counterfeit drugs, but many of the illegal substances on the market today, the ones linked most often to the drug-deaths, are simply amateur attempts to mimic the effects of state-approved substances which were either withdrawn or restricted — once the damage was done. Also, people who become dependent on pain pills may switch to heroin because it is less expensive. In 2016, the National Institute on Drug Abuse in America estimated that nearly half of young people who inject heroin turned to the street drug after abusing prescription painkillers.

The fake drugs are dangerous because nobody can ever be sure what’s in them. State-approved drugs are dangerous because when over-prescribed, they increase the likelihood of addiction and tolerance and therefore the demand for drugs rises — including the fake ones. While America is now doing something about the scourge, what are we doing in Scotland? The Scottish government has cut funding for Alcohol and Drug Partnerships by 6.3% since 2014/15.

Which brings me to my final point. The risk of addiction rises in areas of deprivation for a multitude of reasons. There is interplay between the prescription of drugs for health problems and the subsequent uptake of addictions. This is as true of treatment for physical pain as it is for anxiety and depression. It is also commonplace for people to take drugs that were not actually for them.

Analysis by the BBC suggests around 2.3 million people in England took a prescription painkiller that was not prescribed to them in 2016-17 alone, which means we can be sure it’s going on in Scotland. My drug problems actually started when my gran gave me a painkiller to help me sleep when I was a teenager. Within a week, I was dipping into the medicine cabinet.

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In poorer communities, ill-health is more commonplace, increasing both the likelihood of treatment and the risk that a patient (or someone in the household taking the drugs) may become dependent. Society is awash with psychoactive substances in an age of chronic emotional and psychological stress. Increasing numbers are turning to drugs designed to treat chronic physical pain and mental health problems to self-medicate the emotional pain, stress and anxiety of poverty and social alienation.

Put simply, without serious action on social-inequality, drug-related death and despair are inevitable. If we want to make a serious impact on this matter, we must be prepared to analyse the environments in which addictive behaviours are likelier to emerge.

For some, the social conditions are so miserable, the addiction so severe, and the range of options available so few, that injecting a dirty needle into the groin, despite already having had a leg amputated, seems like a reasonable solution. When that’s your threshold for pain, popping a few tablets is merely a formality.

Back on the street corner, one man is bloated and jaundiced, his black, sunken eyes disappearing into a weathered yet expressionless face. “You have a choice before you take it”, he says, “but after you’ve tried it the choice is gone.” The others nod knowingly as do I, before they break into a discussion about addiction, each recounting their experiences of drug misuse in a manner suggesting they are all, in their own way, resigned to its permanence.

I tell them I have never tried heroin, and they all warn me to keep it that way. Even though they have only just met me, because I have showed them a modicum of respect, they have a genuine concern for my well-being. For in their world of addiction, crime and social-exclusion, telling someone never to try heroin is an act of purest love.