A SOPHISTICATED drugs gang who were producing vast quantities of fake Valium in a back-street garage in a Breaking Bad-style operation have been brought to justice.

Police, who raided the drugs factory in Back Sneddon Street, Paisley, found 1,676,094 Etizolam pills, which are dubbed the Blue Plague, with a maximum street value of £1.676m.

Pills were being churned out at a rate of 250,000 an hour and many more hundreds of thousands more were bagged and stored in holdall for onward supply.

At the High Court in Glasgow on November 27, money man Scott McGaw, 33, of Victoria Road, Paisley, and Eric Reid, 45, of Blackwood Terrace, Johnstone, were convicted of producing the drug Etizolam between May 26, 2016 and March 1, 2017.

Detective Constable Greig Baxter, a drug specialist with Police Scotland's STOP unit, said: “This was the biggest production of Etizolam I've ever attended. I know of no-one who has come across a pill press press operation as large as this in the UK.”

All four were remanded in custody. Judge Lord Burns deferred sentence on them until next month for background reports.

Reid was cleared earlier this year of producing and supplying Etizolam at a house in Howwood, Renfrewshire.