EXCLUSIVE The true cost of Glasgow's gang wars: How city is fighting drugs crisis after kingpins flood streets with heroin and cocaine leading to addicts shooting up in parks and dropping needles with impunity
Two drug users, one in a wheel chair, hunch together as they light a crack pipe on a sunny day in Glasgow.
Oblivious to families and commuters walking around them, the couple are middle aged, skinny with cheekbones and dirty fingernails exposed as they suck on their pipes.
In the streets surrounding the park countless used syringes and discarded plastic spoons, stained with the dried-up gunk from heroin, are scattered across the ground.
This is the other side of Glasgow's horrifying gang war.
The ferocity of the city's warring clans and kingpins has shocked Britain with fire bombings and shootings played on out on TikTok.
While at home the wives and girlfriends of the men wreaking havoc on Scotland's streets have enjoyed all the trappings afforded to a gangster's moll – lavish holidays, designer clothes and luxury cars.
But for locals in Calton, east of the city centre, the story is very different.
Here the community is fighting a never-ending battle against the carnage caused by gangs flooding streets with heroin and cocaine.
One local told MailOnline: 'It goes all the way to Glasgow Cross and Barrowland Park and one of the ladies that works in a cafe there, she's up near this way, and she said sometimes she's going out of her house in the morning and she's stepping over bodies and everything.'
In a desperate attempt to get a hold of the community's drugs crisis, council chiefs opened a 'drugs consumption room'.
Sandwiched between a supermarket and shop selling prams and buggies, the multimillion pound taxpayer-funded facility opened after years of legal wrangling in an attempt to reduce the number of addicts contracting HIV and other illnesses from sharing used needles.
But while council chiefs and health workers distribute clean needles, alcohol wipes and literature, residents claim the more relaxed approached – teamed with an alleged lack of police presence - has made their streets in a hub for dealers and users.
Kicking her way through a pile of debris, drug paraphernalia and needles, a dog walking grandmother who has lived through the times of notorious gangs like the Tongs there in the sixties, has one simple question.
'Why am I being fined for failing to pick up dog dirt, when drug users are being allowed to litter the streets with used needles, drug paraphernalia and bottles of tonic wine - and why are the police now turning a blind eye to those injecting publicly in Glasgow's Dear Green Place?'
The woman, who is approached from time to time by lost users looking for their dealers, has no fear for herself despite having to tentatively scoop around the pile of dog dirt to ensure there are no stray needles around.
She does however fear for her grandchildren, and their safety in a place which seems to now be 'normalising' drug use.
The problem, of course runs deeper than the pile of needles left behind an old unused school in Elcho street, and the issues of having the UK's first legalised fix rooms are stacking up faster than any dredgers can clear the mountains of discarded wrappers, foil, syringes and Buckfast bottles left behind by the disorientated users in Tobago Street.
Even those in support of the groundbreaking project admit the police are now taking a more informal approach to drug taking in the Calton than in other areas of the country.
Ex-undercover policeman Simon McLean, 66, who now works for local drugs charity Leap told the Mail that a soft touch is sometimes needed for complex problems.
He said: 'It's welcoming and anonymous, and most of the users start off with a first name, or Mickey Mouse or whatever, because it's about building trust that they don't have in the establishment.
'They've been treated as criminals for 50 odd years, and have turned to prostitution, and to thieving to feed their habits. This is of course all controlled by criminal gangs controlling the marketplace, so there's a trust build up.
'But they can get a pot noodle, they can get a change of clothes and a shower. They can get a seat and have a smoke outside, in peace and quiet. So it's a haven for them that people will chat to them and find out what the issues are.'
He added: 'At Leap where I'm chairman we need to decriminalise this place alongside regulation where we take control of those supplies and then we can put in place services for people to change their lives.'
However he conceded: 'It's a kind of an informal thing too. The Lord advocate said that it's a no go zone for the police there, but if the police catch you with heroin half a mile away, then you're liable to get the jail.
'The police have just said that as long as you're not doing anything unlawful round about there, they'll turn the bind eye, but it's all very informal.
'I maintain that there's hundreds of safe consumption rooms in Glasgow and 1000's in the country, and they are called pubs.'
And according to locals the flip side also sees Glasgow gangs taking advantage of the police scarcity and the 'safe zone' to deal drugs and prey on those who don't make it to the centre.
Nearby spaces like Barrowland Park, just a stone throw from the famed Barrowland Ballroom and market, prove to be the perfect meet up ground for local drug users to swap and share substances.
In the short time MailOnline was in the vicinity, we witnessed a gang of users, referred to as 'junkies' by locals, smoking pipes in plain sight before injecting each other under their jackets.
Others, who had already taken their fix, slumped over in the sunshine and lay on the grass, semi-comatose and masquerading as sun bathers while passersby walked to work.
Calton resident Dawn, who didn't want to be pictured in this article, claimed more drugdealers had been seen in the area since usage centre was announced.
She said: 'I feel there's a lot more drug dealers in the area, because this thing is here. I don't know if that's the same in Berne Switzerland that has one.
'I would like to know if the drug dealers were in that area when that first opened. People know there's going to be a lot of drug users here now so they're coming into the area. I see all the drug paraphernalia too, the needles lying about the street.
'I've got a couple of grandkids, and I was taking my two year old granddaughter over at this playground. But my neighbours said there's needles all over there, so I don't want to take her there. It's got worse.
'There's cars being targeted in the area, windows smashed and stuff like that. And I think it's all related to the taking of the drugs. A lot of people don't want to use there but the police don't want to lift those who are selling the drugs. They even camp out here.'
Resident Linda Watson who lives near Tobago Street where a disused needle box has now been placed agreed, saying: 'Once people knew where the centre was opening, that's when we started to notice an increase in drug dealers and addicts and more paraphernalia.
'It was definitely just before that opened, because obviously drug dealers were coming to establish themselves before the place opened.
'It's all just escalated since then. These days it is all just strange faces, belonging to different people that are just coming in to buy drugs, take drugs and then go. They don't live here.'
Troublingly Linda even claims that police officers have been instructed to turn a blind eye.
She claimed: 'Police have been instructed not to be stopping and searching people unnecessarily, and not to be hanging around that immediate area, because then that would be a bit off putting for any service users.
'I'm on the drugs forum up there, the committee, and we asked the question of the councillor as well, of what's the situation with the police? And they said they've been told not to stop and search anyone, unless they're causing a breach of the peace, like any disturbance, then they would have an excuse to stop and search them.'
She added: 'It goes all the way to Glasgow cross and Barrowland Park and one of the ladies that works in a cafe there, she's up near this way, and she said sometimes she's going out of her house in the morning and she's stepping over bodies and everything.
She added that she was concerned for the future of the children in the area: 'There should be more money going into prevention and education as well as a chance for recovery at the other end. We have no community centre. We have no schools in this area. We have nowhere for the kids to play in this area.
'There's one little swing park just up the road, and only last week or the week before, two home helps were going through there and said to me, there was someone sitting on the bench at the time when children were travelling to school publicly injecting in a child's playground.
'So this is normalising this for kids in this area. You see needles. You see someone injecting. That's just what happens. So what is the future for them? They shouldn't be exposed to this.'
But who is behind Glasgow's soaring drugs crisis and why are the authorities seemingly powerless to remove the substances from the street?
Ex-undercover cop McLean, who runs the Crime Time Inc podcast, was part of a group of elite detectives in the murder and drugs squads during a 40-year career in the police.
He believes the recent gang war attacks that have plagued the city are a result of the Scottish government going 'soft on crime'.
McLean told MailOnline: 'When we go soft on crime, which we are now because there are no policemen, crime moves in and fills the vacuum. Right now, the organised crime has taken over.'
He added: 'We're throwing fuel on the fire and we call it a success. Every time we have a 'success', what we actually do is make the problem worse.
'What we do is create a vacuum where there are funds to be made. There's a lot of turf wars going on. That's the real consequences of enforcement.
'There's money to be made. It's a marketplace. And there are two or three similar organisations more than ready, not just to take over the patch, but to fight for the patch.
'In the 80s, crime was through the roof because of drugs. Murders and violence were fairly prominent.
'Glasgow has always been like that. Gangs aren't a new thing. There were the razor gangs [of the 1920s and 30s], the sectarianism has always been there as well.
'Afghan heroin hit the streets in the early 80s in Edinburgh, Glasgow and every other major city in the UK and that changed everything.
'That got us to where we are today, not because of those changes but because of the way we handled them with enforcement and prohibition, thinking we could snub out the drug problem by locking people up.
'Drugs are a gift for [organised crime groups].'
Former undercover cop Simon McLean, who also founded Scotland's Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) that is aimed at bringing about drug law reform, previously said the gangs' power could be diminished by ending the enforcement of the prohibition on drugs.
He said decriminalising, regulating and taxing drugs in the way alcohol and cigarettes are, as well as then helping addicts directly, could lead to less crime, fewer deaths and more money for the public.
He said murder rates may have dropped for a number of reasons including the introduction of Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit that aimed to prevent crime by going to the source of the trouble, as well as stricter firearms laws and a propensity for killers to plea murder charges down to manslaughter.
During his time in Glasgow's Govan area, McLean pioneered a weeklong operation to rid the area of drugs.
Although no drugs were sold for the entire week, McLean said the operation was actually a failure that highlighted how police had and are sometimes still taking the wrong approach.
He said: 'We closed Govan. You could not buy smack, you couldn't get drugs anywhere.
'I was getting phone calls from detectives from the Gorbals and Possilpark and Easterhouse and all these parts of Glasgow, saying, ''Are you Simon McLean? Have you got this f***ing operation going? We're getting inundated with all your junkies up here.''
'Because all we did was change the shape. The demand was still the same. They couldn't get it in Govan, so they went elsewhere.
'So nobody went without, although we were hugely successful [in Govan]. It's the same now. No matter how much drugs you take off the streets, nobody is going without.'
Chief Inspector Max Shaw said: 'Police Scotland has a duty to respond to the needs of our communities. We are aware of long-standing issues in the area and continue to work closely in partnership to address these concerns.
'We remain committed to reducing the harm associated with problematic substance use and addiction and our approach to any initiative, aimed at tackling these harms, will be to establish how best we can support it within the confines of the law.
'We continue to engage with members of the local community to discuss any concerns and would encourage reporting of incidents to Police Scotland.'
A spokeswoman for the Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership said: 'We are in absolute agreement that drug taking takes place in and around the vicinity of Hunter Street. It's been happening for years. It's a long-standing issue and one of the reasons for the Thistle's location.
'We have staff outreaching to areas where public injecting is known to take place - and are keen to engage with the community around this in order that we can follow up with any concerns they have.
'At present, the thistle is not able to facilitate the inhalation of drugs but is something we will consider as part of the ongoing evaluation.'
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