IT’S about time that this country had a grown up discussion about drug policy. Back in the 1980s when I was living in Easterhouse, I had many friends who self-medicated on drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism, dealing with the lack of jobs and opportunities, with poverty and deprivation, by getting out of their faces so that they didn’t have to think about how their lives were beyond their own control.

They were ground down by hopelessness, destroyed by despair. Drugs were the symptom of that disease, not the cause of it.

Far too many of my friends didn’t survive the 1980s. They were killed by overdoses, by bad drugs, felled by the health complications created by constant drug, or by attempting to come off drugs too quickly with weakened bodies which couldn’t deal with the strain of detox. Others had their lives blighted by convictions and criminalisation, caught up in the nightmare world of the violence of drug dealing and the gang fighting that came with it.

I know what drugs can do. I’ve walked friends through the night, pacing up and down a room in order to stop them passing out until the drugs worked their way through their systems. I’ve cleaned up the puke and the vomit and worse.

I sat with them through the tremors and the nightmares, the sweats and the visions. The tragedy is that all these decades later the nightmare is still going on.

Scotland has radically changed in many ways since the 1980s, but discussion of drug use in this country has remained stuck in the same Just-Say-No rut that characterised public policy all those decades ago. It didn’t work then, and it’s not working now.

Criminalising people who already have a problem doesn’t help them deal with their issues. It just gives them an additional problem. We’ve tried criminalising drugs for a century, yet we still have a big problem as a society with drugs.

It should be obvious to everyone by now that criminalising drug use is not an effective means of reducing drug use and the harm it causes. If drug policy isn’t working, if the so-called war on drugs isn’t working, then it’s time to change drug policy. The simple use of drugs, as opposed to dealing in drugs, needs to be treated as a public health issue, not as a criminal one.

Recently a project in Glasgow designed to give IV drug users a safe space to shoot up was closed down by the Home Office. The project aimed to remove drug use from the streets and to help ensure that drug users had access to clean needles and so were less at risk of HIV or other disease.

Although the project had the support of the Scottish Government, the UK Government keeps a firm control over drug policy, and insisted on the closure of the project claiming that it encouraged drug use. Glasgow’s drug users are back on the streets leaving dirty and used needles in public places where children can find them.

We need as a society to approach drug use as responsible adults and not as hang-wringing hysterics. It is adult to recognise that not everyone who uses drugs develops a problem with them, and that not all drug use is problematic. In the same way that not everyone who drinks alcohol ends up as an alcoholic, not everyone who uses drugs ends up with a drug problem. That doesn’t mean that we should encourage alcohol use or drug use. It doesn’t mean that drugs should be freely available to everyone. It means that the goal of an effective drug policy should be to teach people how to use alcohol or drugs in a responsible manner that minimises health risks and social harm. It means that our drug policy ought to seek to undermine organised crime rather than give it a ready market.

One of the ways to start a grown up debate is to recognise that there are different drugs, different reasons for using drugs, and to treat these different categories appropriately. The recent discussion about the medical use of cannabis is a case in point. Our current drug policy lumps the medical use of cannabis in along with shooting up heroin up a dingy close or smoking crack. That’s nonsensical. When the law is so clearly nonsensical, we only encourage people not to respect the law.

When my late partner Andy was diagnosed with cancer in the early 2000s, he found that smoking cannabis helped alleviate some of his symptoms. Treatment for cancer is gruelling, but Andy believed that cannabis helped him to get through the process. It helped him to control his pain, and it helped him to get to sleep at night. He also used it to help promote his appetite, and that in turn helped him to maintain his weight at a healthy level. We were living in Spain at the time, where the personal possession of small amounts of the drug had been decriminalised. In Scotland, he’d have been at risk of prosecution.

A different issue again is the use of medical products derived from cannabis. These are also illegal, despite the fact that the psychoactive ingredients have been removed from them. Our drug laws are so terrified that someone might be using a form of cannabis that they don’t consider the circumstances of the use or any theraputic benefit from that usage.

It’s this type of drug use that the UK Government says that it is planning to review, although the Government has firmly ruled out changing the law on other aspects of cannabis use.

Many of the problems around cannabis use are created by the status of cannabis as an illegal drug. Cannabis use can lead on to the use of other drugs because cannabis is an illegal drug and that makes it convenient for it to be sold by the same people who sell other illegal drugs. The link is the illegality. Equally since cannabis is illegal, growers and dealers compete with one another to produce ever stronger strains of the drug since the only motive is profit maximisation.

That means that if we were to compare cannabis to alcohol, there is no cannabis equivalent of a low alcohol beer, only to spirits high in alcohol. It also means that consumers have no idea what they’re getting, how strong the product is that they’re consuming.

Several US states, Canada, Portugal, and Uruguay, have taken steps to decriminalise cannabis, both for medical and recreational use. Civilisation has not collapsed in those places. Here in Scotland we’re still trapped in the 1980s.

But then drug policy, along with abortion rights and broadcasting, is amongst those things that Westminster doesn’t trust Scotland with. We are trapped in a puritan time warp, governed by the fear that someone somewhere might be enjoying themselves. That’s no way to run a public policy. Time is long overdue that all drug use was treated as a medical and public health issue, and not as a criminal one.