Today, we are addressing an area of national shame. Scotland’s drug deaths epidemic is out of control, and we are in need of urgent leadership in order to stop the surge of preventable deaths.

As my colleague Sue Webber pointed out, the problem in Scotland seems to be bigger than it is in other parts of the United Kingdom. Scotland has a rate of 245 drug deaths per million people, while England has a rate of 50 and Wales has a rate of 47.