30 years ago Trainspotting shone a stark spotlight on Scotland’s drug problem – so why hasn’t anything changed?

Fuelled by a blistering soundtrack and a dark sense of humour, when Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting landed in cinemas on February 23, 1996, it was a box office hit like no other. 

Based on Irvine Welsh’s book of the same name, the film followed Ewan McGregor’s self-assured addict Renton and friends, as they drifted through drink, drugs and petty crime, making various attempts to escape the clutch heroin had on them.

The stark scenes ripped up Edinburgh’s postcard image of cobbled streets and culture to reveal a city scarred by poverty, decay, and a heroin epidemic spiralling out of control.

The release of the film coincided with the earliest published drug death figures – 244 that year – and three decades on, that bleak reality lingers, with Scotland continuing to wear the grim crown of Europe’s drug death capital.

It’s a title the country has held, unbroken, for the past seven years.

According to research, there were 19.1 drug misuse deaths per 100,000 people in 2024 – nearly four times as high as in 2000. The latest figures, from policing sources, showed 308 suspected drug deaths between January and March 2025, while police officers in Scotland now routinely carry Naloxone, a drug that can quickly reverse the effects of an overdose, saving lives.

So why has so little changed in three decades?

Thomas Delaney, who runs YouthWISE and speaks across the country about drug harm, tells Metro: ‘Inequality is a primary driver of drug abuse. If you grow up in poverty, you’re 18 times more likely to use substances.

‘Scotland was historically an industrial powerhouse and then all the industry left [in the 1970s and 80s], leaving behind inequality, as seen in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation which ranks income, employment, health, education, skills, training and housing.

‘People still think Edinburgh doesn’t have a drug problem,’ he adds, ‘but it is just as bad as in Glasgow, which is three times the size. Edinburgh just masks poverty and inequality because it also has so much wealth.’

Thomas, who lives between Glasgow and Barnsley, has his own experiences of drug use, having spent 15 years as a functioning addict.

He started using cocaine at 17 to numb childhood trauma before immersing himself in the party scene, where drugs became a way to belong and escape. In his twenties, ketamine became a daily dependency, even as Thomas held down a respectable job.

‘For the majority of my addiction, I was walking around in fancy suits, meeting very important people and securing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of business a year,’ he recalls.

By 2018, his health collapsed, ketamine had destroyed his bladder and Thomas was ordering drugs from his hospital bed. Even rehab wasn’t the safety net he expected.

‘I’d been to some of the worst drug dens ever and had never seen heroin – I was there for three days and I saw people using it,’ he remembers.

While rehab was a battle Thomas has now been clean for eight years – although many of his peers from that time have since died. He now studies addiction as part of a Master’s in community learning and development.

‘The Scottish National Records and other figures show that the people dying are an aging population that have been long-term dependent, and there are tons of reasons for that – homelessness, punitive measures and the stigma attached to being a drug addict,’adds Thomas.

Addiction specialist and psychiatrist Dr Peter McCann, who is Medical Director at Castle Craig rehab clinic in Edinburgh, tells Metro that the ‘depressing’ statistics show just how much the system is failing in Scotland. ‘We’re still worryingly behind where we need to be on reducing deaths,’ he says.

One problem is the over-reliance on methadone, ‘a treatment with known overdose risks,’ says Dr McCann. In the movie, methadone is depicted as something the system pushes to manage addicts rather than to truly help them heal.

‘If somebody wants to be on methadone, there’s pressure on us to allow that, even if we know as a clinician that it’s a lot more dangerous than buprenorphine,’ he explains. (Buprenorphine, widely used in the US and Europe as a heroin substitute, is 10 times safer in terms of overdose risk but less common in Scotland.)

Like Thomas, Dr McCann believes treating addiction requires addressing broader inequality. While working with NHS patients in Wester Hailes, Edinburgh, he saw addiction intertwined with a plethora of other social problems.

‘We had GP practices with lots of different teams working in one place, which is a good model for people needing treatment,’ he explains. ‘But it was really telling how severe and complicated the really unwell patients were.

‘They didn’t just have  an addiction problem, they had housing issues, mental health issues, bipolar disorder, PTSD… there were people who had been attacked from involvement in drug dealing and or there was a lot of cuckooing.

‘Gangs would come from down south, take over someone’s home, weasel their way in by offering them drugs and before you know it, people have been subjected ot violence and sexual trauma.’

Fiona Spargo-Mabbs has spent more than a decade working to reduce drug harm after her 16-year-old son Dan died in 2014 after taking a single ecstasy pill. Believing education could have saved him, she set up the Daniel Spargo-Mabbs Foundation eight days after his death.

The DSM Foundation delivers training across the UK, including Scotland, for young people on how risk-taking and impulsive behaviour are linked to brain development – and how to make safe choices about drugs and alcohol.

‘Drug death in Scotland is just heartbreaking, and it’s still off the scale compared to everywhere else. We want to support young people to make safer choices.

‘The diversity of drugs is much greater now,’ Fiona explains to Metro. ‘We are dealing with ketamine overtaking cocaine and MDMA and are seeing THC vapes, and spice, which is a whole other risk. Drug use is changing all the time, so educators are constantly evolving their understanding to stay ahead of the curve.’

At festivals, testing has revealed MDMA doses two to three times stronger than the harmful threshold, she adds. The dose that killed Dan – a talented and popular year 12 kid who ran errands for elderly people on his paper round – was twelve times stronger than what has caused deaths in the past.

‘We didn’t realise somebody like Dan could be so close to something that had quite so much risk. If something like this could happen to someone like my son, then it could be anyone,’ warns Fiona.

‘If Dan had had a better understanding of what those risks were, I feel sure that he would have been able to manage that decision more safely and come home.’

Rod Anderson, director of Recovery Coaching Scotland, agrees that drugs are now more accessible than ever.

‘You can get a bag of pills or crystals of ket for a fiver. You can order a bag of drugs, easier than you can order pizza, on Snapchat or WhatsApp,’ he says.

Rod, a recovering alcoholic, lost everything to his addiction; his marriage, sons, job and health, before getting sober 12 years ago after frequent attempts. He has since rebuilt his life and relationships, but knows how hard it is to escape addiction.

‘You don’t just wake up one morning think – I’ll have a bottle of vodka for breakfast. You can’t stop at that point, because the withdrawal process is so unpleasant,’ he tells Metro.

‘Everything else in your life at that point becomes irrelevant – relationships, jobs, money. It’s a horrible, horrible place to be, and that’s why a lot of people don’t come back from it, because they die, or they kill themselves, or they end up in jail.’

And jails, he argues, are no safe haven.

‘Drugs are just as easy or even easier to get hold of inside than they are in the community.’

Rod also points out that 70% of drug deaths in Scotland now involve poly-drug use, including alcohol. ‘The drug scene has changed dramatically since the heroin of the Trainspotting generation. Fast forward to now, a lot of those people are dead.

‘People are still using heroin with a whole load of other things, like crack cocaine and synthetic opioids, and that’s dangerous – like Russian roulette. You don’t know what’s going to be in this next hit.

‘What we are looking at now is a much more dangerous environment than 30 years ago.’

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