THE arrest of a drug dealer every five hours in Edinburgh not only gives some insight into the number of criminals involved in trafficking, but into the scale of the marketplace which exists in the Capital.
Dealers are feeding the chemical needs o
f everyone from heroin addicts on the city's estates, to middle class professionals snorting cocaine in the toilets of style bars, to school pupils smoking cannabis behind the bike sheds.
It's a battle that police chiefs claim to be on top of, citing the destruction of several drug networks which fuelled much of the underground economy.
Led by intelligence gathering, the drug squad works to identify dealers with the ultimate aim of working up to the Mr Bigs at the top. The Proceeds of Crime Act has allowed police for the first time to hurt those criminals who have accumulated massive cash and property assets from their activities while successfully avoiding prison – as the seizure of £300,000 from convicted heroin dealer George "Dode" Buchanan last month showed.
Meanwhile, education in schools and treatment for addicts has been established as another vital part of the ongoing war.
The effects of drug use are not only felt in the lives of addicts and their families but in the wider community due to break-ins and muggings that fund drug habits.
The city first gained a notorious link to drug use during the so-called Trainspotting era in the early 80s, when heroin abuse seemed rampant and needle sharing sparked an HIV crisis.
Although education and needle exchange programmes have cut back the danger of passing infections among users, the heroin problem has never gone away. Individual heroin seizures in the force area climbed from 376 to 476 between 2004/5 and the following year.
And figures, revealed last week by the Evening News, showed that a drug dealer is arrested every five hours in Edinburgh, with more now caught in the Capital than any other part of Scotland. A total of 1745 people were arrested in the city for possession of drugs with intent to supply in a single year.
The scale of the drug problem in the city is highlighted by other statistics. The number of drug seizures made by police from Lothian and Borders rocketed by 300 per cent in the ten years between 1996 and 2006. A total of 3245 seizures of drugs such as heroin, cocaine and ecstasy were recorded during 2006, compared with the returns from 1995/6, when there were only 816.
Last January, detectives prepared a hit-list of 80 individuals and made 62 arrests in a single swoop by raiding dozens of addresses across the city. Days later, 50 officers were involved in two raids in Leith against an English gang of dealers.
Yesterday, we reported that nearly £2 million has been seized from criminals in the Lothians in the last five years.
ALONG with "Dode" Buchanan, jailed drugs trafficker Mark Richardson, 42, was ordered to hand over £73,000 in crime profits last month as he serves four and a half years in jail. Richardson, of Cumnor Crescent, Edinburgh, was imprisoned alongside his 19-year-old son, also called Mark, who was described by detectives as the "kingpin" of cocaine dealing in the city.
The operation against the Richardson gang in The Inch was hailed by police chiefs, while criminal sources agreed that the network there had been "smashed into a thousand pieces". But such gaps in the market prove too attractive to go unfilled for long.
And just as drug dealers are unlikely to disappear in spite of the activity of police, users are also in continual supply.
Heroin-fuelled crime committed in the Capital is estimated to cost innocent victims up to £200 million a year, with a hardcore of around 1200 addicts thought to be responsible. Middle-class users who take "recreational" drugs over the weekend are also supporting the city's drug economy. Edinburgh is being flooded with so much cheap cocaine that a line of the drug now costs "less than a glass of wine", selling for around £40 to £50 a gram – half what it cost a decade ago.
For some, enforcement is a peripheral issue in the fight against drugs, which has not affected the price, quality or quantity of drugs in the city. Drug experts believe that education and treatment should be driving force behind tackling their widespread use.
Groups such as the Scottish Drugs Forum are keen to promote the message of educating users about drug dangers. Visits to schools by police to talk to children are a staple of the force's drug police while other potential approaches have proved more controversial.
In November, it was reported police officers were being told not to arrest people for minor drug possession in the city centre under radical plans. People carrying "small" quantities of cocaine, heroin, Ecstasy and other illegal substances would simply have them confiscated, though the force quickly backpedaled from the idea.
Tackling the city's drug problem remains a battle fought on many fronts, but the question remains whether it can ever be winnable.
The full article contains 889 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
