Sir Ian McCartney, a former Labour minister whose son died of an overdose, has said he cried listening to “excuses” from SNP ministers for Scotland’s drug deaths crisis. Figures published last month showed 1,133 people lost their lives in 2025, an 11 per cent rise on the previous year’s total of 1,017 and the worst death rate in Europe.
Former minister's personal loss
Sir Ian, 75, was serving as a Labour minister under Tony Blair in 1999 when his son Hugh, 23, died of a heroin overdose in a Glasgow flat. He learned the news via pager while at a meeting of Labour’s national executive. Hugh’s death was reported as the 107th drug fatality in the old Strathclyde Police region that year, with 291 deaths across Scotland by the end of 1999.
In the 27 years since, deaths have rocketed to among the worst in the western world. Sir Ian said: “I continue to be appalled by the death rate. It’s a long-term issue that’s been allowed to go so far we’re left dealing with an epidemic.
“It’s not just that we haven’t got a grip on this, the truth of the matter is that we’ve completely capitulated. Ministers have got no sense of how bad it is and no sense of what needs to be done.”
Criticism of SNP approach
Sir Ian, who oversaw drugs policy in his ministerial role, criticised Holyrood chiefs for failing to combat the rapidly evolving drugs market. He said: “When I heard the minister in the Scottish Parliament talking about it, I cried listening to it, it was so bad.
“There seemed to be no intention of a strategic approach or a health and social care approach. There was no appreciation of the need to tackle the whole area of criminal activity at very high levels both here and abroad and how the market has become so easy for them.”
Synthetic opioids and rising deaths
The data laid bare how Scotland faces a new synthetic opioids nightmare with lethal lab-made drug “Pyro” – first exposed by the Sunday Mail – implicated in a fifth of fatalities. Stats for 2025 show nitazenes, a potent type of lab-made opioid increasingly found in Scottish street drugs like heroin and benzodiazepines, were one of the main causes for the spike in deaths.
Fatalities involving the drugs trebled in a year to 247. That included 215 deaths where deadly etonitazene – known by its street name “Pyro” – was implicated. The drug, up to 800 times more potent than morphine, has swept Scotland’s streets, killing hundreds. Nitazenes have been branded “Britain’s fentanyl”, referring to the US opioid epidemic which has claimed half a million lives.
Addressing MSPs on the data last month, drugs minister Maree Todd said the increase in deaths was “completely unacceptable” but cited “an increasingly toxic and unpredictable drug supply”. She added there are “growing risks from highly potent synthetic substances” such as nitazenes which “can be hundreds of times stronger than heroin”.
Call for fundamental change
Sir Ian described modern-day drug dealers as like a “walking supermarket” with social media and home deliveries making it more convenient than ever. Criminal gangs brazenly use messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp to bombard addicts with drug menus and special offers.
He said: “The worst thing since Hugh’s death was the year we realised he had been dead longer than he had lived. That was something very difficult to handle.
“My message to John Swinney would be, for goodness sake make this an all-party, all-community issue to drive fundamental change on how we’re handling this issue. Because you can’t say it’s working, or even a little bit that we’ve turned it around.”
Synthetic opioids have flooded the global market since the Taliban’s opium poppy ban in Afghanistan in 2022 which strangled natural heroin supplies. Three people were charged last month after the UK’s first known nitazenes lab was discovered in Ayrshire.
Prof Andrew McAuley, a drugs expert at Glasgow Caledonian University, said: “People have been worried for a long time about fentanyl and about whether we would get something similar to what was seen in North America.
“If anything, what we have now is potentially worse because nitazenes are more potent. The mortality in Scotland has been so high for so long but there’s still somewhere between 40,000-60,000 problematic drug users at risk in the community, so that’s a hell of a lot of people potentially exposed to these substances.
“There is a risk that things could start climbing again if we don’t address this. But the system needs to be set up so it’s prepared for whatever new substance comes in rather than reactionary approaches.”
He said drug-checking services should have been established “years ago”. Scotland’s first such service was supposed to open in Glasgow this month but the plans were delayed due to “complexities”.
