Thirty years ago something happened that changed Glasgow forever … and nobody noticed at the time.

Heroin arrived on Clydeside in the summer of 1980. Margaret Thatcher was tearing apart the city’s old industries, throwing thousands on the dole.

And smack dealers were waiting to pounce on her victims.

Glasgow, authorities in Glasgow at least, knew nothing about it. Until it was too late.

The city was never to be the same again; its crime rates were never to be as low.

Over the last three decades at least 20,000 people in and around Glasgow have taken heroin.

In 2009 the city had around 5500 ‘problem users’ of the drug, give or take a margin of error of 5%.

There were fewer than 100 heroin users listed in Glasgow in 1980. That figure had jumped tenfold within a year.

The Evening Times was the first to spot the crisis. Just before Christmas of 1980 our front page warned that teenagers were turning to heroin. Addiction, we said, had reached “alarming proportions”.

Nine heroin users had been referred to the Southern General in just six weeks in autumn that year.

Within nine months this paper was citing a university expert talking about “a permanent epidemic of crime and addiction” with 1000 addicts on city streets.

The academic was Jason Ditton.

The now-retired professor of sociology today said: “What happened in 1980 was extraordinarily significant.

“I remember the day a doctor from a clinic at Charing Cross showed me some statistics about addicts coming to see him.

“We knew what was coming … but there were those who scoffed at us.

“I put in big new doors on my flat, as I knew many people would be burgled.”

It took a decade before anyone tried to count heroin addicts in the city. By 1990, one study found, there were around 8500.

Four years later another ‘guesstimate’ put the number of people injecting the drug, rather than smoking it, at between 4000 and 7000.

The most recent attempt to come up with a figure on the problem was made last year using 2006 statistics.

The official Scottish Gov- ernment number for injecting drug addicts in Glasgow was 5458.

This epidemic raged throughout the 80s. According to Home Office statistics unearthed by Glasgow University researcher Maria Gannon, there were 100 new users recorded in the old Strathclyde Region in 1981 but nearly 500 in 1985.

The figures were just the tip of the iceberg but showed the relentless rise in addiction.

Alasdair Forsyth was a young researcher when heroin hit the big Glasgow housing schemes in the middle of the 1980s.

The first of 100 addicts he interviewed for a project died within hours of speaking to him. She was a young woman aged 24.

Only two of those he interviewed got off the drug. One became a bank robber, the other was convicted of beating his wife.

Glasgow’s addicts were not the glamorous Bohemians associated with the drug in the post-war years.

A study in the 1960s found there were three heroin addicts in the city.

Two were Canadian and one was a folk singer.

Dr Forsyth, now of Glasgow Caledonian University, said today: “We didn’t have the swinging 60s in Glasgow.

“We had the slashing sixties.”

As London and New York experimented with drugs, Glasgow binged on gang violence.

The 1980s generation turned away from knives to heroin.

Dr Forsyth, said: “I remember addicts joking that they used to do other people’s heads in

“But now they did their own heads in. They used to be stabbing other people, now they were stabbing their own arms.”

The irony was that, despite widespread panic, few Glasgow addicts died in the early years.

Some experts openly doubted the scale of the problem.

But Aids – the blight of the needle-sharing Trainspotting generation, especially in Edinburgh – changed their minds.

Now experts reckon the overall number of addicts has “plateaued” … they can’t bring themselves to use the word “stablised” in respect of heroin.

Fewer youngsters have started to take the drug. But there are still enough new addicts to replace those who died. And die they now do.

Police have long since stopped talking about a war on drugs … they only fight wars they can win. But that hasn’t stopped Glasgow from suffering casualties.

Heroin was linked with 338 deaths in Scotland last year, 120 of them in Greater Glasgow. That was more than in the entire 1980s and 1990s put together.

Experts will quibble about what a drug death is.

Some say official figures once underestimated the problem. Others say today’s numbers are exaggerated.

The official death toll, however, is worth recording.

Since 1980, 2860 Scots have suffered heroin-related deaths, more than the combined fatalities suffered by British forces in Afghanistan (the source of almost all supplies of the drug in Scotland) as well as Iraq, the Falklands and Ulster.

How many people died before 1980? One, in 1976.

Other cities which developed heroin habits in the 1980s have somehow weaned themselves off it. Not Glasgow.

Dr Forsyth reckons the problem isn’t the drug. He thinks the problem is poverty.

He said: “People have rose-coloured spectacles about the pre-heroin era, saying, “this used to be a nice scheme” when it had razor gangs, joyriders and skinheads.

“My view is it’s the underlying problems of poverty, disadvantage in education, jobs, ignorance and lack of hope for the future that need to be addressed.

“Sort those problems and you’ll see substance abuse start to reduce.”

CASE STUDY: JOE

Joe knows all about smack. It killed his brother and it nearly killed him. Sometimes he wished it had.

The 40-year-old was one of the original 1980s junkies, one of the ghost-like figures who used to haunt the closes of the city’s poorest housing schemes, looking to score gear through the letter boxes of dealers.

Joe is now clean, but he is one of the dying generation, the men and women in their 40s who have used for more than a decade and whose bodies after years of punishment are giving in.

His brother was one of them. He overdosed at 45. He had seven kids and a criminal record as long as his arm.

“It was like he had had cancer or something,” says Joe. “It was sad. But it wasn’t unexpected.

“It could so easily have been me. When I was using, I would have welcomed death sooner rather than later. “If I could have pushed the button, I would have.

“I had a few lame attempts through trying to overdose, but I just woke up the next day. That was a horrible feeling. Now I have experienced recovery, I am glad I came round.”

Joe, who asked us not to give his real name, believes he was lucky: his mother and father stuck by him, let him stay in the family home as he destroyed their lives yet somehow saved his own.

He admits: “I drove both round the bend with my drug use. I stole off my nearest and dearest and sold their things.”