I remember first reading Irvin Welsh's train spotting when I was 15 years old, and it was a brutal, almost visceral experience, in fact.

His darkly comic collection of stories focusing on a group of friends in Edinburgh in the 1980s,

well, it revealed to a wider audience the horrors that heroin can inflict.

And frankly, since that time, my homeland has

struggled to deal with drug addiction and its consequences. Whilst the new set of official figures

do show a marked decrease, Scotland still has more drug deaths per capita than any other country

in Europe. I'm Neil Patterson, and in this edition of the Daily,

we'll be asking why.

A little later, we will be speaking to a substance misuse expert

and Irvin Welsh himself,

but we start with our Scotland correspondent, Conard Gillies.

Connor, take us through the figures,

a reduction in drug-related deaths,

but it's still a pretty grim picture, isn't it?

Certainly not one for any cries of victory in all of this.

151 people died in 2022, which is a drop of about 279 deaths on the year before.

So that is significant because let's remember Scotland has had a

spiraling, a staggering rise in deaths, you know, really for more than a decade now. It really took

off in 2013 where the loss of life went through the roof. So yes, there has been a drop. But let's put it in context. If we look back at

1996, that's when the official figures began being gathered. Deaths in that year were just

244 people. 244 too many, but it just shows you the really troubling period that Scotland has gone through to this

journey today. Looking at the data, I mean, 151 equivalent to three people dying every day,

...