ALBERT Einstein said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Nowhere is this more true than in the current drugs policy.

As a young man growing up in a mining community in the ’80s and ’90s, cannabis was the drug of choice at that time. Then heroin hit the cities and housing schemes before the rave scene popularised ecstasy.

A few years ago I chaired a session of the Scottish Parliament health committee. I took the opportunity to tell the then Cabinet Secretary Shona Robinson that the streets of Scotland were now awash with cheap cocaine (the new drug of choice for many) and that this was having a terrible impact on our young people, their families and communities.

What depressed me about our exchange was the lack of awareness of the extent of the problem and the complete lack or urgency in dealing with it — indeed the impression I got was that she and journalists reporting the committee’s business simply didn’t believe the point I was raising.

This feeling was exacerbated in subsequent parliamentary exchanges with the Public Health Minister Joe Fitzpatrick — all the more remarkable as his home city of Dundee, the place he represents, has the highest levels of addiction and drugs deaths in Britain and Europe.