Change of scene: Former Scottish Drugs Forum CEO David Liddell's final interview

'There were maybe 20 services, mostly two people and a dog,’ says outgoing Scottish Drugs Forum CEO Dave Liddell of Scotland’s drugs sector in the mid ‘80s. ‘There were no local planning structures or anything, so you had almost a blank sheet to develop policies and ideas.’

He’s retiring this month, having worked at SDF since it was set up in 1986 – the longest job he’d had before ‘was about 18 months,’ he says, so his tenure has safely beaten that record. He’d previously trained as a biochemist, then become a social worker before going to work for SCODA, the forerunner of DrugScope.

Parts of Scotland were already in the grip of a serious heroin problem when SDF was set up, and he was one of the people calling for the establishment of needle exchanges. ‘There was a complete lack of knowledge in terms of the development of anything like that, but obviously HIV drove those changes so even the Tory government at the time had to agree to needle exchanges being developed.’