When you’re trying to score heroin, there is always a middleman. Business is done from mobile phones, and instead of going to collect your little bundle of joy at some grotty flat, you can organise a lovely, civilised handover at your place.Heroin can be stopped when it comes into the country but, once here, it is found only if kept in staggering quantities in one place, and dealt directly from there. The police aren’t very good at tracing dealers; it is obvious when an unmarked police car (always a navy blue Escort, for some reason – perhaps Ford are giving them away free in return for something) is following you, and they are easy to lose So we can rest easy on that score, as it were. There’s plenty for everyone.The problem, for the authorities, is that they are already doing the right thing.

People are indeed benefiting from the general acceptance that rehabilitation (rather than, say, incarceration) is the ideal remedy for dependence, and from the latest drives to increase risk-awareness among recreational users. But youngsters will always go where their curiosity takes them, provided they believe that what they’re doing is “cool”. And now brown has gained that kudos.When Leah Betts died after taking one ecstasy tablet on her birthday, a nation of kids was immediately on guard. The death of the teenage fitness instructor Julia Dawes this week will surely reinforce the message. It will take similar blows to get us to stop taking heroin: a spate of overdoses in top-of-the-league-table schools, or the death of someone whom users see as a contemporary.Of course, you could say that these wannabe junkies just need a short, sharp shock. This would certainly work: stop-and-search police prowling the streets, frequent body searches at clubs, compulsory drugs-testing nationwide in colleges and universities.

But it seems a shame when the youngsters are having such a nice time.Drug dependency rests upon having an “addictive personality”. Some people try every substance in existence and remain clean; others take one line and get hooked. For all you kids getting ready to try heroin, let me just point out a few things: brown can do more damage in six months than any other drug can do in 10 years. If you don’t mind liver failure, impotence, acne, constipation and loss of appetite, then you’re ready to take on the social aspects of the drug. Zero sense of personal responsibility will ensure that if you need money, you can steal it without a second thought. Zero human empathy will guarantee you’ll lose all your friends, giving you more time to indulge your habit.And, by the way, brown is the worst come-down drug you could choose.

It is a sedative, chemically not unlike morphine, which doesn’t send you to sleep but just knocks you out for a while. If you are keen to experience the come-down from heroin, why not try lying on a bed filled with broken glass? The sensation is roughly the same, only worse.. WHEN I WAS heading this week to yet another media interview to explain why the appointment of Gus Macdonald as Scottish industry minister would be of real value to Scotland – to Scottish firms, to Scottish jobs, and to Scottish people – I ran into the head of one of Scotland’s biggest companies. “At last we’ve got somebody who understands business in government,” he said, “who understands what life is like at the coalface.” Not that in the past we have not understood business in the Scottish Office. But I am happy to rest on his judgement: that we understand it better now. Those judgements, and the judgements of the Scottish people, are the judgements that matter. Not the protests of our political opponents – in the case of the Conservatives, out of touch and out of office in Scotland; or in the case of the separatists, trying with their usual base opportunism to wrest Scotland in a direction which the Scottish people do not want.
But the judgement of people who matter in Scotland, who care about the fabric of Scotland, who want Scottish industry and Scottish companies and Scottish employees to succeed.