It was billed as a ‘national mission’ to tackle the drug deaths tragedy – but the SNP’s bid to curb the crisis has proved a dismal failure.

Official figures last week showed a rise of nearly 12 per cent in the number of fatalities, which remain at the highest level in Europe.

Yet Health Secretary Neil Gray responded with the claim that the latest bleak statistics showed ‘much [had been] achieved in a short space of time’.

The ‘mission’ was launched back in January 2021 by Nicola Sturgeon – who admitted her government ‘should have done more earlier’.

She conceded that the SNP had taken its ‘eye off the ball’ as the death toll soared – but what has changed for the better in the past three years?

The National Records of Scotland (NRS) found that 1,172 people died due to drugs misuse in 2023, or an average of more than three per day – up by 121 on 2022.

So, the net result of the Nationalists focusing with supposedly laser-like intensity on this problem is that it’s getting worse – a sadly predictable outcome given its abysmal track record in every other aspect of government.

The reason for the drug deaths rise isn’t hard to find – failed policies have been continued, driven by discredited ‘experts’.

Policing has been hollowed out so that officer numbers are at a 16-year low, and the virtual disappearance of beat patrols has severed the connections between the force and the communities they serve – robbing police of vital intelligence on dealers.

Stripped of police stations – with dozens shut down or sold off – these neighbourhoods are left to fend for themselves, at a time when top brass claim the service doesn’t have the cash to investigate every crime.

In some areas, there aren’t enough cops to break down the doors of drug dealers, as a senior officer in Fife admitted earlier this year.

The reek of cannabis fumes is ever-present in lawless streets where violent crime has risen and anti-social behaviour runs riot, turning some urban centres into no-go zones.

Drug misuse, effectively unchecked by a much-diminished police force, has fuelled the decline – anyone caught with small amounts of drugs including heroin and cocaine might well get off with a slap on the wrist, in the form of a Recorded Police Warning.

If you want to know how many have been issued for the possession of hard drugs, don’t bother asking police because they’ll tell you it’s too expensive to extract the data.

Justice Secretary Angela Constance has defended this rap-on-the-knuckles approach, while Chief Constable Jo Farrell said last week that drug users were ‘victims’.

Her statement was in line with the wider plan to treat addiction as a public health rather than a justice issue – but the drug deaths data suggests that it’s failing.

Ms Constance also backs the Scottish Sentencing Council – an SNP Government creation – which devised guidelines urging leniency for criminals under the age of 25 on the basis that their brains have not fully developed.

This means gangsters can prey on people in their early twenties – recruiting them as dealers – knowing that there will be no meaningful sanction, and they will be back in action selling drugs within a few hours, or perhaps instantly.

Most egregiously, Ms Constance and her party back decriminalisation of all drugs for personal use – to allow people to be ‘treated and supported rather than criminalised and excluded’.

Last year, British Columbia (BC) became the first province in Canada to decriminalise the use of hard drugs as part of its efforts to tackle a deadly opioids crisis – but the policy is already unravelling.

In BC, the drug deaths crisis was first declared a public health emergency in 2016, and last year the province saw a record of more than 2,500 overdose fatalities.

About 225,000 people are estimated to use illegal drugs, and experts say a toxic street drug supply – laced with fentanyl and other products – puts each of them at risk of death.

But residents and political opponents say the scheme is a ‘harmful experiment’, implemented without safeguards for the public, which has ‘utterly failed’ to reduce overdose deaths.

Whether or not Ms Constance is aware of these developments is unclear, but either way her party is still a cheerleader for decriminalisation – and so-called ‘safer consumption rooms (SCRs)’.

An SCR is set to open in Glasgow this autumn, allowing addicts to inject their own heroin under medical supervision.

The flimsy justification for its launch is that these facilities are said to have worked in Canada, which pioneered them.

Yet Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones has announced that SCRs located within 220 yds (200 metres) of schools and childcare centres will have to close by March 31, 2025.

Ten of the province’s 23 sites will close – and they won’t be allowed to re-open elsewhere.

This U-turn isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to spiralling drug deaths in Canada.

Advocates of SCRs in Canada say there simply aren’t enough of them, meaning a point is never reached where they will concede the idea hasn’t worked – instead they will always argue that more are needed.

In Scotland, the SNP is presenting the Glasgow SCR as a possible turning-point in the ‘national mission’ – as if the Canadian experience had never happened.

Under a separative initiative, pharmaceutical-grade heroin is doled out by the NHS in Scotland to hardened addicts for whom the substitute drug, methadone, has been ineffective.

The NRS figures last week showed 514 deaths were linked with methadone in 2023, up from 474 in the previous year – yet thousands are ‘parked’ on it rather than getting the rehab help they need.

Nothing will change until there’s a recognition that the strategy so far has been based on shoddy evidence, outright falsehoods, and wishful thinking.

The rot started long ago – in 2008, SNP Government advisers dropped the term substance ‘misuse’ in favour of ‘use’ to acknowledge that illegal drugs can often be used ‘safely’ – and to avoid stigmatising addicts.

Now even the word ‘addict’ is verboten in public health circles, as if a change in terminology could save lives (it won’t).

The same experts also said most people are substance users to some extent because they ‘use’ alcohol or caffeine – while failing to mention, of course, that neither of these are illegal.

They helped to create and embed a culture of political correctness that has consistently underestimated the devastating repercussions of the drugs menace.

Until ministers and their misguided advisers accept the failure of liberal ideology and soft-touch justice to turn the tide against this catastrophe, many more lives will be needlessly lost.