From Bagpipes to Battle Cries: Scotland’s Fight Against Addiction
Here’s a question for you.
What’s the one thing the following have in common:
- The pneumatic tyre
- The television
- The Encyclopedia Britannica
- Logarithms
- Golf
- The United States Navy
Answer: They were either invented, created, developed, or founded, as the case may be, by Scotsmen.
And that’s just a sampling. If you go to Google, you’ll see a list of over 200 innovations attributed to Scots.
So we’re no dummies!
Call me biased, but as a Scot who has travelled far and wide, Scottish people are some of the friendliest, warmest, most hospitable, and brightest anywhere.
And as for Scotland’s beautiful scenery, don’t get me started.
It’s an idyllic place with idyllic people. Well, while I still get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I hear the skirl of the bagpipes playing ‘Scotland the Brave’, there’s something about Scotland that I’m NOT happy with, and it came as quite a shock to me and about as welcome as a dead cat at a wedding.
But before I go on, let me back up a little. As fate would have it, I went to live and work in the United States, and today, I work there in the drug rehabilitation field. However, I was born and bred in Scotland’s fourth-largest city, Dundee, and lived there for the first 25 years of my life.
So what’s upsetting me (to put it politely) about Scotland and my hometown of Dundee is the subject of drugs. While excellent reports giving statistics, facts, ‘reasons why’, and so forth about the Scottish drug situation have been written by others, I just wanted to throw in my tuppence worth and write a few lines on a bit of a personal note.
Dundee, like other UK cities, has long been noted for its alcohol consumption (on a Saturday night, one might wonder if it’s regretfully become our national sport), and excessive alcohol consumption was and still is a problem.
But if that's not bad enough, someone has been pouring on the coals over the last few years because these days, Scotland has the highest mortality rate in Europe due to drug use. And what really twists the knife for me is that my hometown of Dundee leads the way as Europe's number one city in that regard.
Now, I confess to being no saint, and in my college days in Dundee, I downed a few pints on a Saturday night with the best (or worst) of them. But opioids, meth, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana were not part of my life back then. Those were drugs that you might see someone taking in a Hollywood film – but not down the road from where your Aunt Bessie lived!
Over the years of working here in the US, I realized just how lucky and possibly naive I was to think that these drugs didn't exist in my beautiful Scotland because they most certainly did; drug addiction knows no borders.
But now, for example, one reads that Dundee police seized more than a million pounds' worth of cocaine in February 2024.
Changed days indeed – and not for the better!
So to those I will always consider ‘my ain folk’, I'll say this: get smart, find out what these drugs are, and learn the truth about what they can do to a person. As much as the news from Scotland pains me, it's unsurprising given what I've seen in my travels.
Here are a few facts to illustrate my point:
- Marijuana is much stronger than it used to be. It can affect memory and cognitive function and create harmful cardiovascular effects and respiratory conditions.
- Heroin is a highly addictive drug, and for some people who are dependent on heroin, nothing else in life matters except the drug.
- Cocaine consumption can produce long-term effects, including damage to the lungs, convulsions, heart disease, and seizures.
- Fentanyl is an opioid approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin and, when overdosed, can cause coma and lead to death. Other opioids, such as morphine, oxycodone, and methadone, cause similar effects.
To any parent reading this, my advice is to learn about what's out there that could affect your son or daughter's life and if it happens to be too late and you have a loved one or friend who is already addicted to drugs or alcohol, then send them to a very successful drug rehab program such as Narconon, where I work.
So come on, Scotsmen and Scotswomen! Come on, Dundonians! It's time to wake up and take a stand. The land that is responsible for so many wonderful inventions can certainly make a difference if we educate our loved ones on the horrible effects that drugs have not only on them but also on our beloved country.
‘Scotland the Brave’ is the tune we should be playing – not a funeral dirge.
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