The latest drug death figures for Scotland are nothing short of a national disaster.

With more than 1,130 deaths recorded, the rate of death is not only the highest in Europe but twice the rate in England. There is no place in Europe where it is more dangerous to use illegal drugs than in Scotland.

Shocking as these statistics are, they are not a surprise – for the past fifteen years the extent of Scotland’s drug problem has been starkly evident in government statistical reports and media coverage.

Year after year, as these figures are released, we witness an ever-changing stream of political leaders wringing their hands in sympathy for those who have died and their loved ones and offering vague reassurance that the latest drug strategy will target those at greatest risk.

Oh, how the cabinet secretaries in the Scottish Government must relish being given the drugs portfolio.

Let us be clear, however, that the drug policies we have been following to date have achieved nothing more dismal than confirming the extent of the drugs toll on our small country.

Over the past 20 years we have pursued a policy which, piling irony upon irony, is called harm reduction.

That policy has reached its lowest point in the commitment to provide places where drug users can go to have their illegal drugs tested for purity. With these centres we are effectively assisting the drugs trade.

This is an initiative that may soon be extended to other Scottish cities, demonstrating more than anything else that when it comes to public policy a mistake made once is almost certain to be repeated again and again.

Instead of offering services designed to help individuals use illegal drugs we should be working determinedly to make Scotland the last place, not the first place, to use illegal drugs.

The money made from the drugs trade in Scotland is beyond anything any of us can imagine and lies behind the current spate of violence and murders between the leading crime gangs.

These gangs are fighting over enormous riches and there is nothing they will stop at in protecting those riches.

Everyone in the communities where drug use flourishes is aware of who is profiting from the drugs trade. If the authorities do not know their identity by now they are suffering from an utterly inexplicable myopia.

What we need to be doing is massively ratcheting up the penalties for selling illegal drugs, confiscating all assets associated with the drugs trade and massively inconveniencing those selling drugs.

We should be instituting further punitive penalties such as removing individuals’ driving licences where there is clear evidence they are dealing drugs, cancelling individuals’ passports, stopping public benefits, restricting movement, and removing internet access to those who have chosen to sell drugs.

With regard to those who are using illegal drugs, we should forget all about assisting their drug use and focus on ratcheting up our drug prevention and drug treatment efforts.

Those efforts need to have one goal against which they should be measured – reducing the number of people starting to use illegal drugs and increasing the number of people quitting their addiction.

The Scottish Government may pat itself on the back announcing more than 1,000 drug rehabilitation places in Scotland. 

If you think this sounds impressive, remember that Scotland is a country with over 50,000 addicts. Do the maths and you see the inadequacy of that provision.

These latest figures show us very clearly where we are failing but who in government is actually listening?