And not a single word about the main supply chain? Hm. England does not merely leak drugs into Scotland. It feeds the market through two arteries that have shaped the country’s overdose crisis. The older one is wholesale. Now, for half a century Merseyside has been a warehouse for cocaine and heroin that Scottish crime groups buy by the kilo. Cash travels south on the M6 and M74, product comes back north. EncroChat files later showed the same map in messages: loads staged in London, Essex, Newcastle and Liverpool, then pointed at Glasgow. Liverpool’s importers sit closer to the ports. Glasgow’s firms sit closer to the customers. They trade rather than annex each other. The newer artery is county lines. Gangs from Liverpool, London and the West Midlands no longer sell a consignment and leave. They keep the phone, send runners up the east-coast rail line and the A9, and occupy flats in Inverness, Aberdeen and Peterhead. Police call it cuckooing. The line sells crack and heroin in towns too small to sustain a local cartel, then extracts the cash. Highland officers count a dozen such lines at a time and work with Merseyside’s Project Medusa to hit the exporters at source. When wholesale cocaine tightens, both systems starve, prices jump. Adulterants follow. Nitazenes appear in the mix that kills people in Glasgow closes and Highland bedsits alike. The English routes are not a side story. They are how a South American harvest becomes a Scottish death certificate. But what do I know... | #Scotland #England #BBCnews

Your reminder that Anas Sarwar once promised drug law would be devolved to Scotland only to U-turn when told to by London.