DRUG deaths in Scotland have hit a record high and a factor in half the cases is the use of the heroin substitute methadone. David Liddell, of the Scottish Drugs Forum, has argued this may be because some addicts are not given enough of the drug and substitute it with others. But perhaps we need to question the use of methadone itself.

To be a modern-day politician in Scotland, one must be caring and be seen to be caring, and in the context of drugs, this means treating everything like a disease. This approach often feels rather empty and ritualistic, another form of virtue signalling played for the audience and to gain a sense of moral goodness rather than part of a more rational and worldly attempt to relate to the issue at hand.

Unfortunately, it also adds to the culture that helps to infantilise the public who come to learn that everything is addictive. Indeed, the term "addiction" is now used so casually it is hard to know if it still carries any meaning.

It’s worth remembering that part of this so-called caring approach was less to do with concerns about patients than about the New Labour obsession with fighting crime and turning public sector workers into cops. In England, doctors were paid for every patient they could get onto methadone, not exactly a recipe for best practice.

Hidden behind the caring approach is often a rather degraded view of people, especially poor people, who, it is assumed, always need our help.

Another leading expert Gabor Maté, discussing the problem on the radio, explained that every single female addict he met over a 12-year period was sexually abused as a child.

He said the trauma they carry with them is what explains drug addiction. Forget economics, poverty, culture, morality or indeed our capacity to deal with hardship – it all comes down to childhood abuse and trauma. Here the complexities of the human condition are reduced to a pure form of determinism that would make the old eugenicists and craniologists proud.

Self-respect and a determination to give up drugs comes from a variety of sources, often with growing older, becoming a parent or finding work, from improvements in economic and social conditions or life-changing events that force you to take yourself more seriously.

It also comes from the culture and norms in society, particularly from the promotion of personal responsibility – something that is often lost once you become accustomed to the idea that events in your childhood determine the rest of your life. One day it may occur to us that a script of victimhood has been hand delivered to today’s addicts – along with their daily dose of methadone.