STONE AGE CATAPULTS FOR A MODERN CRUSADE

MY CANDIDATE for the next honours list is a pharmacist from Aberdeen, whom
I will call Mr Coulter for his own protection. Upright and rational, he is
instantly recognisable as a certain type of dependable Scot. In the past he
would have engineered bridges and administered the Empire. The modern-day
Mr Coulter, who runs a friendly chemist's shop, is still in the front line,
as a participant in Aberdeen's methadone-dispensing scheme.

What this means is that 30 heroin addicts come into his shop each day and
drink their prescribed methadone with a glass of water under supervision by
staff.

They get it safely, without fear of being attacked in the street.

Mr Coulter knows they have the correct dose of pure methadone and are
actually taking it, not selling it. He also exchanges dirty needles for
clean ones, a scheme which, he believes, has held back the spread of HIV in
the Aberdeen area.

These transactions are not without hazard. "We have to be really vigilant,"
Mr Coulter told MSPs visiting Aberdeen this week. His staff, who have had
used needles thrown at them, are accustomed to checking that customers do
not retain the methadone in their mouths.

Fifty people have been banned altogether. Mr Coulter, who is paid by
Grampian health board for taking part in the scheme, must also budget for
shoplifting by addicts desperate for cash.

But he feels he is providing a service to the community. "Without the
methadone, these people would be out mugging old ladies, they would be
burgling your house and mine. We are helping to stabilise the problem."

It takes a lot to silence an MSP, but members of the social inclusion
committee left the chemist's shop lost for words. Never let it be said that
MSPs lead a sheltered existence in Edinburgh. This inquiry into drugs and
deprived communities has taken the social inclusion committee all over the
country, from Ayrshire to Fife. But this is not Scotland as most people
would think of it. This is an expedition to another planet, a Scotland that
few of us know and fewer want to visit.

MSPs are making forays into a world so alien it could be science fiction,
where the culture and customs are different, where responsible witnesses
stagger out of the mist with stunned first-hand reports.

The caring professions are being forced to confront the most awesome social
problem of our age equipped with the equivalent of Stone Age catapults.

When he was at college training to be a pharmacist, Mr Coulter never
dreamed he would end up serving heroin addicts.

Neither, it is fair to assume, did his GP colleagues imagine they would be
hiring security guards for inner-city practices.

Trainee teachers did not expect that pupils would be dealing drugs via
mobile phones at school.

Social-work students did not anticipate that half the children taken into
care would have parents misusing drugs, as is now the case in Fife.

Aberdeen is known as an affluent city, but it has the Scotland's highest
rate of drug injectors per head of population. MSPs heard from social
workers about families where the children shuttle between the sheriff's
court and the doctor's surgery; parents relieved to have their children
taken away because it leaves them freer to pursue their addiction;
grandmothers coming to the rescue and finding retirement rewinding into
parenthood.

As if it were not hard enough to work on the front line, professionals are
not getting the support they need. Social workers are forced to keep
children in care because there is a year-long waiting list for the parents
to go for detox in Glasgow. Teachers persuade a parent to admit to
addiction in the family, then have nowhere to refer them for help. Mr
Coulter, asked if he could rely on the police when addicts became
threatening, replied that the police were too overstretched.

Ministers are quick to criticise public-sector workers for failing to
modernise, slower to help them cope with modernity. The social inclusion
committee is uncovering a shortage of treatment facilities which, in a
country with an addict population of between 20,000 and 30,000 (estimates
vary), is nothing short of scandalous. Aberdeen has no drug detox services;
patients must be sent to Edinburgh or Glasgow. According to the Scottish
Drugs Forum, which gave evidence to the committee last month, Dumfries and
Galloway has one treatment facility, an outreach worker and a community
psychiatric unit for the whole county.

In Inverclyde, there is a six-month waiting list for methadone prescribing.

MSPs visited Drugs Action, a voluntary organisation that specialises in
work with prostitutes and runs a needle exchange scheme.

The project recently withdrew from the coastal towns of Peterhead and
Fraserburgh. Not because it was no longer needed - both have seen a big
increase in heroin injecting and a spate of drug-related deaths among the
young - but because Aberdeenshire council slashed its grant.

These are crazily perverse outcomes, which ministers are trying to correct
with common sense.

The policy unit has carried out an audit of the A3250 million spent on the
drugs problem each year, to see if the money is being put to best use. The
executive's drugs strategy, published last month, promised more research
and better coordination between agencies on the ground.

MSPs will have an opportunity for dialogue with the justice minister, Angus
MacKay, when he appears before the committee next month.

The drugs inquiry will be a test of how far the executive and the
parliament can cooperate.

It is not just a question of holding ministers to account - although the
SNP's Fiona Hyslop has asked sharp questions about the value of the Pounds
10 million new Drugs Enforcement Agency. It is a question of whether
ministers will heed the news MSPs are bringing back from the front line.

The people who gave evidence in Aberdeen spoke privately but frankly, with
none of the vague euphemisms that we are accustomed to hearing from
politicians. They were not inhibited by the polarisation between "zero
tolerance" and "harm reduction" that clouds debate about drugs in Scotland.

One teacher volunteered that her pupils saw drugs as cheap and easy, with
no real risk attached.

Tell them "Just Say No" and they would laugh in your face, she said. A
former addict told MSPs how happy heroin made her feel - for the first
couple of hits, leaving her chasing a feeling she could never recapture,
like the opium addicts of the 19th century. But few politicians would
entertain publicly the notion that heroin and happiness have anything to do
with each other.

If politics is to have relevance to real life, martial metaphors about a
"war on drugs" will be of little use. Mr Coulter, who has accumulated more
knowledge of heroin than he could ever wish, believes that it should be
decriminalised, "putting the dealers out of business overnight".

He would rather be dispensing pure, state-approved heroin from his pharmacy
than methadone, which can be just as dangerous. But they will not make him
an OBE for saying that.