The recorded numbers of attempted murders, serious assaults and knife-crime incidents in Glasgow have significantly decreased in the past decade. Scottish government figures show that there has been a significant decline in the type of territorial gang violence that was once commonplace in the city’s housing schemes. Some take this as a sign that gangs are decreasing in influence. But my research tells me that the activities of Glasgow gangs are simply evolving.

Along with my fellow criminologists Robert McLean, Simon Harding and James Densley - from Northumbria University, the University of West London and Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, US, respectively - I have published a cluster of papers based on groundbreaking research into gang culture and its links with organised crime in Glasgow.

We conducted life-history interviews with more than 40 young men who were mostly in their teens or early twenties. All had grown up in housing schemes characterised by widespread unemployment and poverty, and many had experienced abuse, neglect and social disadvantage in their family homes.

The young men indicated that, after they spent some brief time on the streets engaging in territorial violence as young teenagers, the lure of making easy money had led them to begin supplying drugs. Collectively, their drug-dealing careers began with the social supply of cannabis. The exchange of weed with others within their peer networks for modest sums was gradually replaced with in-house cultivation.

For instance, when one man was a young teenager, his father and uncle grew cannabis in the house, which facilitated his own venture in the drug economy. The money he gained from selling weed afforded him the kind of clothes and shoes he needed to build a positive image among his friends.

The Scottish government’s Justice in Scotland: vision and priorities strategy draws attention to the links between poverty and criminogenic outcomes while also highlighting the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and future offending patterns. Preventing and mitigating ACEs is regarded as a “moral imperative” by the Scottish government - and teachers are in a good position to recognise early warning signs and prevent negative consequences.

In the case of the young man with the drug-cultivating family, if his teachers had spotted the risks at an early stage, they could have sought the views of colleagues from other agencies who may already have been involved with the family - including health professionals, social work services and the police. Drawing up a collective care plan could have mitigated this young man’s risk of harm and helped to divert him from a career in drug supply.

But until poverty and social inequality are eradicated, the prospect of fast cash from drug dealing will perhaps always be attractive for young men in post-industrial communities.

Some of the men we interviewed told us they had slowly progressed from selling cannabis to friends to acquiring their own “customers” beyond their immediate peer networks. To boost profits and meet consumer demand, they gradually diversified their stock and sold drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines, at times funding and servicing their own growing drug habits along the way.

Criminals can be victims, too

The health and wellbeing “experiences and outcomes” in Curriculum for Excellence emphasise the need for young people to gain a “range of skills that can support decision-making about substance use” and to be able to “apply these in situations that may be stressful or challenging, or involve peer pressure”.

Some young men we interviewed had clearly developed drug-dependency issues and needed to acquire an income that would support their habit. Often, this came about as a result of peer pressure, as well as the stressful and traumatic environments in their homes and communities.

Teachers need to be able to recognise the early warning signs of abuse and neglect that can stimulate involvement with substance misuse. They also need to routinely equip their pupils with the skills to become resilient against peer pressure and make positive choices about substance use early in their adolescent years.

Choices for Life is a Police Scotland initiative aimed at raising awareness among young people aged 11-18 about the dangers of drugs and about how to deal with negative peer pressure (young.scot/choices-for-life). And Know the Score (knowthescore.info) is a helpful online resource about drugs that provides information on where to get help.

These are useful for teachers, but schools also need to be proactive in working with leaders in health and social care, police and the third sector to support at-risk families to find routes out of poverty, while also reducing the impact of toxic stress on young people, which can lead to dependency, addiction and crime.

“County lines” drug dealing is an emerging phenomenon that involves urban drug gangs crossing police borders to courier illicit substances to more rural areas. There has been a recent explosion of reports in England and Wales suggesting that organised crime groups (OCGs) are deliberately targeting vulnerable children and young people, grooming them to traffic drugs with promises of money and status, but then controlling them through violence and abuse.

Some young men in our sample in the west of Scotland had also become recruited as drug runners for organised criminals. These men had travelled to smaller urban towns and villages to supply drugs. Others had increasingly begun to position themselves more firmly on the edges of organised crime. Ditching their former mates in the housing schemes, they were now old enough to drive and had begun to make drug runs to the North of England. They picked up drugs from mid-level dealers in places such as Liverpool, then distributed them back in Scotland before making cash drop-offs.

These insights have many implications. When evidence of drug supply among young people is uncovered, schools need to view this behaviour within the context of criminal exploitation and recognise them as potential victims of trafficking rather than merely criminals. With those children and young people who are already neglected at home, teachers should be extra vigilant to identify the potential for wider exploitation outside the family emerging in the context of OCGs; ongoing collaboration and liaison with community policing teams and local youth and outreach teams can help with spotting the signs.

There are also wider lessons here in terms of school exclusion. A 2018 report by the Home Office suggests that OCGs in major English cities target children who have been excluded from school to groom them as county-lines drug dealers. School leaders in Scotland would be remiss not to recognise that exclusion from school could be a trigger for vulnerable young people already on the fringes of drug-supply activity to become exploited by organised criminal networks.

Responding effectively to the evolving nature and influence of gang culture - in the west of Scotland, in particular - requires an ACE-aware and trauma-informed approach to tackling the root causes. This must be inclusive and compassionate, and recognise young people as potential victims.

But there is also a wider implication to the research insights I have described: schools can only do so much to tackle the inequality and disadvantage that lie behind substance misuse and to prevent young people from being drawn into drug supply and organised crime. The sheer scale of the drug problem has reached a critical stage, to the extent that longer-term policy amendments are needed.

The cost of addiction

National estimates published by NHS Scotland in 2019 (isdscotland.org) suggest that there are just under 60,000 problem drug users across the country - about 10 per cent of whom are aged 15-24. The total economic cost of illicit drug use in Scotland is thought to be about £3.5 billion, and Police Scotland has indicated that there are now more than 160 known OCGs across the country.

About 70 per cent of Scotland’s organised crime is located in Glasgow, with more than 65 per cent of this related to drug supply. Yet there was a time in living memory when problematic drug use in Scotland and the wider UK remained low, and when there was no association between drugs and crime.

My summer reading this year included two recently published books by Neil Woods. He is a former undercover police officer who risked his life infiltrating the UK’s most vicious drug gangs, but who now campaigns for drugs to be treated as a health problem rather than a criminal justice issue. I have become increasingly convinced by his arguments. Woods highlights that, when the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was introduced, there were only 1,046 problematic heroin users in the UK. Within two decades, the number had increased to 350,000.

Traditionally, if someone in the UK had a problem with drugs, they were taken care of and looked after - they were simply prescribed drugs by a doctor as part of their treatment. But after the American model of prohibition took effect and the Misuse of Drugs Act began to criminalise drug users, they became increasingly marginalised and found recovery more difficult.

At the same time, OCGs emerged, and their power in the world of drug distribution strengthened year after year. As Woods argues, instead of the doctor’s prescription pad determining the supply of drugs, gangsters and criminals started to control the market.

Woods is now a prominent member of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, which seeks to raise awareness of the failure of current drug policy and reduce its harmful consequences, including death, disease, crime, addiction and exploitation.

It is not hard to find evidence of the latter - my research has illustrated the way in which young people get drawn into drug-supply networks because of social and economic disadvantage and are then exploited by OCGs. In addition, national statistics published last month by National Records of Scotland showed that Scotland had the highest rate of drug-related deaths in the EU in 2018.

A new taskforce will shortly be established by the Scottish government to examine drug laws and consider whether elements of the Misuse of Drugs Act could be devolved north of the border to allow medically supervised drug-consumption rooms amid growing calls for the decriminalisation of drugs.

My research highlights the worrying repercussions that the “war on drugs” has had on increasing the market and on drawing people into a different and more sinister type of gang culture. I believe teachers need to add their voices to the calls to change drug policy in Scotland. By adopting a public health perspective on drugs, by legalising and regulating their supply, we can deprive professional gangsters of the income that enables them to terrorise local communities and exploit vulnerable young people.

My thinking has been challenged and realigned by my summer reading and the findings of the research I have been involved in. I hope teachers reading this might also begin to reflect on the potential for new, radical ways of addressing drug-related crime in Scotland - because we must continue to find ways to support and protect our most vulnerable young people from its worst effects.

Ross Deuchar is professor of criminology and criminal justice, and a former assistant dean of education at the University of the West of Scotland. He tweets @rossdeuchar

This article originally appeared in the 23 August 2019 issue under the headline “We’re hooked on a failing drugs law”