In 2018, 20 people died through drugs in West Dunbartonshire. Lee McCallum knew most of them.

To him, they are not a statistic, they are not faceless, nameless bodies behind a figure on a spreadsheet. Some of them were friends, others were not, but all of their deaths could have been avoided.

A former addict, Lee has now turned his life around and is a resident of the Safe as Houses programme in Clydebank, but said more needs to be done to tackle the scourge which is claiming so many lives.

For the Dumbarton native, the answer is clear: support.

Lee told the Reporter: “I think there needs to be more places like Safe as Houses opened.

“[The current approach] is just about flinging people into jail, and it’s not working.

“I understand it, because some of the crimes that people commit when they’re on drugs are terrible, but that’s what it drives you to.

“It’s the rules of the jungle out there.”

Statistics released by the National Records of Scotland show the deepening of the drugs crisis in the west of Scotland, including Dumbarton and the Vale and surrounding areas.

In 1996, five people lost their lives through drugs in West Dunbartonshire. By 2018, 20 people had died.

That number was up 25 per cent from 2017 alone.

In 2018, 19 of the reported deaths in West Dunbartonshire were caused by accidental overdoses, and just one was the result of long-standing drug abuse.

That figure demonstrates a continuing trend in the area, where all drug deaths in 2017 were the result of accidental poisonings.

In West Dunbartonshire, heroin and other opiates proved to be the biggest killer, being found to have played a part in 16 deaths in 2018.

A new drug was also reported in the area for the first time this year - “street benzodiazepine”.

Read more: REVEALED: West Dunbartonshire drug deaths up by four times in two decades

A total of 12 people lost their lives, at least in part, due to the new illicit drug.

Lee said: “I had to be removed from the community for my recovery, I couldn’t do it out there.

“Community addiction teams work to an extent, they manage to get people on to methadone, and they save lives.

“But there’s no support. You go and get your methadone and then you’re away again.”

Safe as Houses is a residential recovery programme that can house addicts at its facility in Clydebank, or one of seven different “scatter flats” for up to 18 months.

Run by Dumbarton-based Alternatives West Dunbartonshire, the programme aims to drag people out of addiction by offering psychological support, as well as paths to education, training and employment.

Alternatives also offers a number of different services for addicts in West Dunbartonshire, partnered with the council, courts, prison service and police.

Lee, 33, believes separation may be the best chance some of the addicts he knows will have at kicking their habit.

He said: “For a lot of people that I know in this community, they need to be taken out and go somewhere else.

“Fortunately for other people they can come into places like Alternatives.

“But most importantly, addicts need other addicts around them, all trying to get better.

“Therapeutic communities of addicts have really helped me.”

Lee had a simple message for the Scottish and UK Governments, who were locked in a war of words last week over who is responsible for the crisis, and whose job it is to fix it.

“If they don’t step up and start supplying the type of support we get here, there’s just going to be more and more deaths,” Lee said.

“They need to be putting more funding into recovery houses, I just don’t see any other way around it.

“Something needs to be done, because more and more people are going to die, and they don’t need to die.

“The waiting list that we have here is so long, that people could die before they ever get into Safe as Houses and that has happened to people, just because there’s not enough space.”

Speaking to our sister paper, the Clydebank Post last week, Alternatives general manager Donnie McGillvery said de-criminalisation may be the answer.

Mr McGillvery said: “I would certainly agree with the decriminalisation of drugs.

“We need to get back to seeing it as a medical and social issue.

“If it was just about stopping people from taking drugs, we wouldn’t be in the problem that we are in.

“People return to drugs through social isolation, low life chances, and because of traumatic experiences.”

The campaigner, who has 35 years of experience working with people struggling with addiction, also called on both governments who run Scotland to work together.

He said: “The Scottish Government and Westminster really need to stop looking at each other for faults and need to start working together to find a solution.”

Nicky Brown, 30, has spent the past six weeks in Safe as Houses.

He was forced to make a change after “losing everything”, including his children.

Nicky, from Dumbarton, has seen “death after death” since the age of 15, when two friends died through drug and alcohol abuse.

He said: “That’s just what you surround yourself with. There’s a cycle of overdoses. It’s not intentional, it’s just the life you’re in and the people you surround yourself with.

“When I think about it now it makes me feel sick.”

Nicky thinks prison releases should be reformed for people struggling with addiction.

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He said: “You can’t expect someone with an addiction problem to come straight out of prison, back into the same community with no house and no job, but with money in their pocket to stay off drugs.

“They’re going to go back to the life they were in before that happened. Your life pauses when you go to prison, then you come back out and the same thing starts all over again.

“There needs to be more support for that, whether it’s day release or whatever. There just needs to be something else in place.”