My name is Simon McLean. I was a police officer for almost 30 years, mostly in CID, and largely involved in enforcing our drug laws. I spent my career enforcing laws I now consider not only obsolete, having been crafted in 1971, but wholly unfit for purpose.
That is if your purpose is to save lives lost to addiction. To defeat organised crime and deprive them of billions. To prevent future generations being criminalised, stigmatised, and ignored until they become another statistic. For that, I must apologise.
My oath was to enforce the law. But it was also to preserve life, protect our communities, and make our streets safer. I now realise that in doing one, I was undermining the others. We were stoking the fire of drug use. We were sustaining a black market of death. And we were failing to stop young people sliding into the grip of addiction.
What we did, and continue to do through this so-called War on Drugs, is force the market underground. Out of sight. Out of reach. We only see the damage when it arrives in our hospitals or mortuaries. By then, it is too late. We fail to intervene at the many stages of addiction that come before that point. Why?
Because our laws, our media, and our society refuse to accept a simple truth. People use drugs for reasons. And it is those reasons we should be addressing.
Around the turn of the century, a police officer in Strathclyde had an idea. Backed by colleagues and a far-sighted Chief Constable, they tried something radical. They looked at violence through a different lens. Not as a criminal justice issue, but as a public health one. That was the birth of the Violence Reduction Unit. It worked. So well that it is now studied and copied around the world.
Glasgow was once labelled the murder capital of Europe. Within a decade, homicides had fallen by more than half. Knife carrying among young people was cut dramatically. Hospital admissions for violent assault fell by over 60 percent in some areas. Not because we arrested more people. But because we finally understood the causes. That was the lesson.
When we stopped asking how do we punish this, and started asking why is this happening, everything changed. We did not excuse the behaviour. We understood it. And once we understood it, we could intervene before the damage was done. Lives were saved. Communities became safer. Violence dropped.
So the question is obvious. Why have we not done the same with drugs? Because the parallels are there for anyone willing to look. People do not pick up a knife in a vacuum.
And they do not pick up drugs in one either. There are reasons. Always.
Trauma. Poverty. Mental health. Isolation. Hopelessness.
We recognised that in violence. We built a system around it. And it worked. But with drugs, we continue to pretend the problem is the substance. It is not. The problem is everything that leads a person to need it. Instead of addressing that, we criminalise it. We drive it underground. We hand control of the supply to organised crime.
And then we act surprised when people die. Every death is treated as an isolated tragedy. It is not. It is the inevitable outcome of a system that refuses to learn from its own success. We already proved another way was possible. We just chose not to apply it here. We already know what works. Scotland proved it. When we treated violence as a public health issue, we reduced it. When we looked at causes instead of consequences, we saved lives. So why do we refuse to apply that same thinking to drugs?
Because doing so would force us to confront the truth. That prohibition has failed. In almost 60 years, it has not reduced supply. It has not reduced demand. It has not protected our communities.
What it has done is create a vast, unregulated black market controlled by organised crime. It has criminalised the very people we should be helping. And it has cost lives. Thousands of them. If we are serious about saving lives, then the answer is clear.
We take control of the market. We remove it from organised crime. We regulate supply. We treat addiction as a health issue, not a criminal one. And we intervene early, before lives are lost. This is not radical. We have already done it. We just called it something else.
When we accept this and begin working together, instead of repeating tired rhetoric about clamping down on supply, we can finally begin to change what is happening on our streets.
We can reduce the daily deaths.
We can protect the vulnerable.
We can support those trapped in addiction.
We can give their children something they deserve.
Hope.
And when that day comes, when the facts can no longer be ignored, there will be apologies.
For the lives lost.
For the families shattered.
For the communities failed.
I am simply getting mine in early.
Simon is an author and co-hosts a popular True Crime Podcast with former Deputy Chief Constable Tom Wood.
