The disaffected, heroin-addicted young men immortalised in Irvine Welsh's bestselling novel are now in their 40s. And, it emerged this week, they are dying fast
Among the many quotable passages in Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, one stands out: "Choose life," says Mark 'Rent-boy' Renton. "Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning ... Choose life ... But why would I want to do a thing like that?"
He chose heroin instead. There were many like him – and figures released this week by the General Register Office for Scotland bleakly underlined Welsh's satirical point: that what they were really choosing was death. Drug-related fatalities increased by 26% from 2007 to 2008 – there is now up to one every four days in the Lothians. Four in five of the dead are men, and the greatest increase is among men aged 35 and above, long-term heroin users who have come to be called the Trainspotting generation.
Welsh's scabrous novel is set in Leith, Edinburgh, in the mid-1980s, when heroin use there was just taking off. Opiates had been a part of Edinburgh life for centuries: pure opium, the historian Michael Fry has pointed out, arrived in the city in 1693. By 1877 it was widespread among the middle classes (who could afford it). Heroin was first synthesised in 1884, and Edinburgh factories were soon manufacturing it. "By the end of the 19th century," writes Fry, "Edinburgh produced most of the world's opiate drugs, heroin included." Production continues to this day.
In the 1980s things changed drastically, for a number of reasons. There was more supply – a sudden influx of cheap heroin from Pakistan, which was welcomed, says Welsh, by the "big pool of heroin users up here". And supply coincided with unprecedented receptivity. The 70s had ended with massive unemployment, felt particularly keenly in working-class, previously industrial areas, and the 60s' brainwave, peripheral housing schemes which, by the late 70s, writes Aaron Kelly in his monograph on Irvine Welsh, "had already stagnated socially into ghettos". In 1979 a referendum on devolution failed, and Margaret Thatcher was elected.
When Trainspotting was first published, Welsh says, he was roundly chastised for glamorising heroin abuse. It is true that his harsh rhythms, and, when Danny Boyle's film came out, its driving soundtrack, humour, and attractive lead (Ewan McGregor) gave it a gritty, sexy allure. The film was shown out of competition at the Cannes film festival, but became the festival's one unqualified hit. It made more than $30m (£18m) – was so popular, in fact, that for some years afterwards Tim Bell, 63, lay chaplain for the Port of Leith, used to run Trainspotting walking tours in his spare time (The Classic, according to his website, involves visits to "Sick Boy's pub – Leith police station – Welsh's flat – Dockers' Club – Leith Central Station – Central Bar – Fitay the Walk – Kirkgate – Banana Flats – Shore".) Welsh is still irritated by the attacks – "I look now at all the drugs education; they're actually using outtakes from Trainspotting!" – and talking to those who were there at the time it becomes clear that he was only describing what was going on, what he knew, what he still knows, because among the men dying now are boys he met then.
It's true there were those, a few, who took the book and the film too much to heart, and saw glamour where they should have seen despair. "I remember speaking to a community activist in Muirhouse and she was telling me how people had seen Trainspotting as a manual of how to behave," says Gordon Munro, a Leith city councillor.
"It's got this bullshit aura or mystique, a dark underworld feel," says David, who started using heroin in the mid-90s and is now clean. "In reality [heroin addiction] is the furthest thing from that. It's just degradation. Every day is a living hell." It was exacerbated by rave culture – "people were taking heroin to come down from the ecstasy," says Willie, a 42-year-old who began injecting heroin when he was a teenager, in about 1985 (he has been on methadone since Christmas) – but heroin chic was not a concept that seems to have made many inroads. "I don't think that went past London fashion week, to be honest," says Mark, dismissively.
As for the users themselves, they say there was little culture, not a scene as such. "You try and keep away from people," says David. "You just want to be left alone to do heroin. Even if someone overdoses, your first thought is not, 'Oh, are they OK?' Your first thought is to seek out where they got the heroin from – that's how sad it is. Everyone uses everyone, and if you do build relationships it's for a common purpose, to get what you need. It's dog eat dog."
"I don't think it's the kind of drug you take to be happy," says Mikey, a 35-year-old who started using heroin 10 years ago and has tried to kill himself several times. "It's a drug you take to take away pain, to put your life on hold, numb everything. Most of the people I know, that's why they take it. Trainspotting generation? I don't think that's got anything to do with anything."
What it had to do with, mostly, was thousands of young people with nothing to do, and no prospects. "By 1983 you had 3.6 million unemployed," says Welsh. "It tells its own story – you've got a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands. The government was basically creating demand." And they were naive. "You're talking about people who wouldn't normally be involved the heroin scene," Welsh once said. "People didn't have the [Alexander] Trocchi-esque attitude of setting themselves up in opposition to society. It was just people who didn't have a fucking clue." Mark remembers people overdosing on heroin, and friends injecting them with speed to bring them round. "You just can't do that. But they didn't know."
And they were Scottish. A 2008 study in the British Medical Journal of the so-called "Scottish effect" (mortality is 15% higher in Scotland than in England and Wales) found that the excess was mainly accounted for by males aged under 45 – and that at least a third of that was due to problem drug use, usually heroin. This difference – and thus the rate of current deaths – can be ascribed to a peculiarly Scottish cocktail of risks. Firstly there's an underlying issue of self-esteem. "Englishness is the norm," says Welsh. "Scottishness is increasingly seen as a second-class thing. There's always been an idea of two types of Scots – those who went to London and made it big, and the second-raters who stayed home. It's a very negative thing." In Thatcher's Britain "Scots were losers, young people were losers, the unemployed were losers," as Bell puts it.
Then there are specific cultural habits. "The crack cocaine scene you see in the south, the stimulant scene of Birmingham or Manchester, that's not taken off here," says Mark. "Culturally, a lot of people prefer depressing drugs like opiates – heroin, Temazepam. The problem is if you take these drugs in combination and add alcohol that can increase risk factors."
There is also a distinct preference for needles. "It's whisky versus beer," says Welsh. "In Scotland we've always gone for the dangerous hit. In England there's always been a more mellow way – the slow pint of beer in a pub. That's just my own observation." There's more defiance in it – "even the most desperate junkies and alcoholics often have this swaggering bonhomie about them" – and it's more efficient. "I don't want to stereotype," says Welsh, "but it's more cost-effective to inject [heroin] than to burn it in foil, when you're burning it into the air, effectively." "It's simple economics," adds Mark. "You get a bigger, better bang for your buck."
In Scotland, the heroin problem was dealt with as a law-enforcement issue: authorities deliberately made it difficult for users to obtain clean needles, forcing them to share – and thus contributing, directly, to an explosion of Aids cases. "Dundee and Edinburgh were the two main hotspots," says Mark. "A lot of the people I was working with were the same age as me, and 80% of them were HIV positive. There were no antiretrovirals then, so a lot of them were dying."
"I was in prison in the 80s," says Willie. "Lots of people were injecting. Some had the virus and they weren't telling people – they were sharing the needles. That helped kill a lot of people." Drugs policy changed, partly as a result of the Aids crisis, partly, suggests Mark, as a direct result of the success of Trainspotting, and there are now needle-exchanges – but as Mikey points out, it doesn't help that the police tend to use the needle-exchanges as bait. "If you go to get safe equipment you know you'll get busted."
And it has become a way of life. "There are estates," says Welsh, "with three generations who have graduated from alcohol to smack. You could go to any of their mobile phones, and the call-list would be all dealers and junkies.
"In some families you have the alcoholic grandfather, the son who's been an alcoholic and heroin addict and the grandson who's a heroin addict. The generation before that might have been heavy drinkers but in there was work in the shipyards, so they had a reason not to get wasted."
At The Junction, a local health project in Leith, spokeswoman Sam Anderson says that if the younger generation aren't on heroin, they'll be on something else: "The kids we are dealing with now have aunts, uncles, parents who were part of that generation. They are aware of the worst it has done, so they will tend to use different drugs. It is not that all the problems behind that have changed, however. They just choose other ways."
But "over the last 10 years [heroin use] has increased so much it's unbelievable," says Mikey. "Ten years ago it was easy to get cannabis – now you can get heroin just as easily." How easily? "Two minutes." He is particularly exercised by the recent closure of the Links Project in Leith, where addicts were taken in before being referred to rehabilitation units. There is a new programme called Leap, but, Mikey says, they don't take anyone on anything above 30ml of methadone a day; many people he knows are on 130-160ml. "There's nowhere for them to detox now. I know of three or four deaths that wouldn't have happened [if it was still open]." According to Audit Scotland, there are more than 50,000 heroin users in Scotland, and waiting lists of up to two years for treatment.
The answer, says Welsh, is to provide something outside drugs – opportunities, and rehabilitation. But this is not happening. "If you're a working-class kid in the schemes," he says, "what are the alternatives? There aren't many. If you go to a middle-class district in Edinburgh there are cafes and bars, people have money and jobs. You go to a scheme just a few miles down the road from where I am just now, there's nothing there. It's all boarded-up places, maybe a corner shop where you can get milk and rolls, there might a local scheme pub and a bookie – nothing else." He is contemptuous of the Scottish Conservative leader Annabel Goldie's term for the Trainspotting era – a "wasted decade": "It's more than a wasted decade – it's been a wasted 35 years." And neither he nor Mark see it getting better any time soon: according to the Scottish parliament, some 1.2 million people in Scotland live in poor households – 25% of the population. Mark says he read this week's headlines about rising joblessness with a sense of foreboding. "I just see another lost generation – there may be new substances, cheap alcohol and such – but I think we'll see a modern version of the Trainspotting generation."
Meanwhile, that generation is dying 30, 40 years too early. Partly it's the result of long-term addiction. "People who come into these services have very difficult past lives," says Mark. "You've got psychological scars, physical scars in terms of chronic poor health, and a lot of them are living in poverty and deprivation – wrap all that together and it's not exactly rocket science.'"
And partly – again – there is naivety, exacerbated by a twisted social morality. Many of the dying may not even be on heroin anymore. "They will say, proudly, 'I'm clean now,'" says Mark. "What they're saying is 'I'm no longer taking unacceptable drugs. I'm no longer a dirty junkie.'" But a lot of them will have hepatitis C that hasn't been diagnosed or treated – and damages the liver. "They might be drinking half a bottle of vodka a day, and literally drinking themselves to death. It's a comment on how we view drugs in this society. I find it quite sad."
When I called Willie, who lives in Leith, almost the first thing he told me was that there had just been another death that evening just down the street from his flat, and the coroner had arrived. "I heard it was an overdose."
Some names have been changed