AS THE Courier continues its week-long series investigating the problems associated with drugs in Fife, Community Safety Minister FERGUS EWING writes exclusively for The Courier on what the Scottish Government is doing to tackle the problem nationwide:

Let me begin by paying tribute to The Courier for helping to raise the profile of one of the greatest social challenges of our time in such a responsible manner.

There can be few more pressing issues than tackling the scourge of drugs. Scotland has, per head of population, more problem drugs users than any other country in these islands and more than most comparable European countries.

Of course the true impact of drug misuse extends far beyond the individual drug user—it destroys families, damages communities and costs our society millions of pounds. Fife is no exception.

That is something I am not prepared to stand back and accept. As some of your readers will already be aware, earlier this month the Scottish Parliament endorsed our new national drugs strategy, an approach based on promoting recovery for problem drug users.

I am acutely aware that the existing approach is well meaning and has highly-committed professional people behind it. Real progress has been made in getting people into treatment for drug addiction.

However, I firmly believe that we need to place more emphasis on working with drug users to help them achieve recovery.

Recovery is the principle that more than just reducing risk and harm, services should support people to move on, towards a drug-free life, as active and contributing members of society.

I have met many service users in every part of Scotland and I know that recovery is hard.

It takes a long time to recover and a lot of effort by the person involved and by those who provide help. However, simply getting people into treatment can no longer be seen as a successful outcome in itself. That is a key point of the strategy.

Treatment services must be integrated with wider employment, training, housing and counselling support services to help people to recover and rebuild their lives.

Our new approach strives to leave no corner of the drug misuse world untouched, from the training of future health professionals to the information available to parents and grandparents.

It puts in place the foundations for a sustained drive to recover lives and reduce the social and economic costs of drugs on our society.

We are driving forward one of the most ambitious programmes of change in the history of public services in Scotland, reforming not just the delivery of drug support services but the very culture that underpins them.

We want to challenge the culture of arrogance within organised crime that they and their assets are beyond the arm of the law, and challenge any culture of fatalism among drug users that recovery is impossible.

We now need to focus on outcomes and turning recovery into reality. The strategy sets out a programme of action to achieve this.

If we want a more successful Scotland, with opportunities for all to flourish, then tackling problem drug use is not something that we can avoid or ignore.

As a society, together, we need to face up to Scotland’s drug problem.