There was a time when the scourge of drugs - both soft and hard - was a regular feature of the daily news, along with calls from groups on one or other side of the argument for, if not legalisation, then de-criminalisation, or much harsher penalties for trafficking.
More recently, however, aside from some annual breast-beating over figures showing Scotland as the European “capital” of drug deaths - and it retained that dubious accolade last year, despite a fall in fatalities - the threat has generally commanded far less prominence than it once did.
