hello. 0ur weekend comes to a stormy this is bbc news, i'm rebecca jones. end across england and wales, as the headlines at 4pm... set out the concessions they require from the eu to support freya co m es the pm's brexit deal. end across england and wales, as freya comes in from the atlantic bringing widespread gales and in some areas gusts meanwhile the international trade bringing widespread gales and in some areas gusts in excess of 75 a 17—year—old boy who was stabbed secretary says leaving march mph. we've watched this low to death near altrincham last 29th is still possible — night is named by police. the foreign secretary, jeremy hunt, but a delay may be necessary warns that attempts to end yemen's civil war have reached, deepening on the satellite. now the hatch is open: america's in his words, the "last pushing through the irish sea and it chance saloon". new astronaut capsule will eventually track into the north makes its test flight sea by the time we get into monday the dutch husband of shamima begum, morning. for areas around the to the international space station. periphery it is going to be a stormy the teenager who has been stripped of her british citizenship night. the south—west of england and forjoining the islamic state group, a 17—year—old boy tells the bbc he wants them who was stabbed to death wales will bear the brunt of the way in hale barns, near altrincham, in through the evening, especially to live in the netherlands. has been named by greater around the coasts, and the wind it was acceptable for you to marry manchester police as yousef strengthening late evening and a 15—year—old girl? it was her own choice, overnight in the midlands, east ghaleb makki from burnage. anglia and northern england. very she was the one who asked to look gusty by the end of the night on the for a partner for her. lincolnshire coast and north of east then i was invited, and yeah, anglia. the heart of the storm is in bbc scotland's chris clements the north sea. much quieter by the she was very young. reveals stories from one rural time the rush—hour arrives. heavy community where lives have been eight lawyers who back brexit — rain on the tail end of the low. seven of them mps — devastated by the growing abuse this frontal system here meaning of prescription pills quite a wash—out over southern bought illicitly online.

england on monday. it will pull away this is the story of a community in crisis. from the south—east quickly so there it turned her into a monster. will be some sunshine to follow. staying windy behind the low in the of a generation addicted to north—east through the day but eastern areas gets decent sunshine. and dying from prescription drugs. i've been there while in the west, some heavy showers, may folk died in my house. it's the story of the changing face be thundery. feeling chilly, of substance abuse... this xanax business, high—temperature is 9—11. low pressure is staying with us this that's really quite new. and an unseen trade in deadly pills, via the internet, week. unsettled weather. 0n straight to your door. it's drugs like this that pressure is staying with us this week. unsettled weather. on tuesday we're going to see quite a few are killing people in scotland, and that's how easy it is to get showers coming together, perhaps ahold of it, via facebook. longer spells of rain in northern that's incredible. tonight, disclosure takes you behind the rising level ireland and england and southern of drug—related deaths, scotland, perhaps even some snow to those trying to stem the tide, with cold air to the north of the and to the lives of those uk. by the end of the day, thicker cloud in the south—west, rain pushing in here and into wales. who are left behind. looking into the atlantic for the next which will come in on wednesday. wet and windy affecting all areas at some stage. maybe even she was just gorgeous, and just something more wintry as the low bubbly, and she was the apple of everybody‘s eye in the family. bumps into the cold over scotland, especially higher ground. some

brighter skies further south but she just danced the whole time, also heavy showers. a bit more mild she was...from the day she was born. by wednesday, highs of 13 or 1a but chilly in scotland. there is the week ahead, staying unsettled, i think we had 16 years of kym wednesday looks like the wettest and of just pure innocence windiest day, and a chillier theme over the coming days. she just danced the whole time, she was...from the day she was born. i think we had 16 years of kym of just pure innocence and growing up and blooming, and then itjust seems to be like... well, the only word i can say for it, it's like it turned her into a monster. sometimes she would come out, and you could maybe tell she was on something, and we used to get our hats and coats on, and i used to go up the fields with her and walk, and we'd walk for miles, and as i walked and walked and walked, i could see she was coming back down, and then she'd come in and have a cup of tea and eat... have something to eat and then she'd be fine. is anyone you know affected by heroin addiction?

consistent with the rest of scotland, drug deaths in dumfries and galloway are increasing, which is why nhs drug and alcohol service are holding several events where people can receive training on how to recognise signs of an overdose and other potentially life—saving benefits. #let'sstopthedeathsnow. dumfries and galloway isn't necessarily an area that you would associate with drug use. it's largely rural, and parts of it are quite affluent, but in actual fact it does have its problems. just to give you a wee bit of context, in 2012, six people died here. in 2017, it was 22 — so something is happening here. the way people are consuming and dying from drugs here has changed. for so long, drugs like heroin were killing people. now, they're combined with lethal cocktails of pills. that'sjohn paul when he started school when he was five.

that's joseph when he started school. that's christopher. why did yous move down here? to move to a better life, to get away from the city and away from the drugs and that, the drug use. little did i know that i was bringing them down to a place where they would have drugs. i thought down here they didn't have any drugs, cos it was that nice and everybody knows one another, and i soon found i was wrong. i knew he was taking a vast amount, but i didnae know exactly how many. ijust knew he was taking a vast amount of drugs. i kept telling him to stop it, to slow down. but he wouldnae listen.

for years, john paul was taking a catalogue of prescription drugs, most of them bought illegally. one of his brothers, christopher, found him the night he died. and i went in his room and put his light on and then i go, "something's not right. " so i dropped my phone and i slapped him, and got no response. i phoned 999. they told me to get him out of bed, on the floor, to start pumping his chest until the ambulance arrived, but i knew in my heart that he was gone. so i need to be strong for my wee brother and my mum. both christopher and joseph are heavy pill users, including street valium. do you want to stop? can you stop? no.

it's too far gone. i've been taking them fae when i was 14, 15 —year—old. i'm now 35. i hate taking drugs, but i have to. so do i. do you think i enjoy waking up in the morning and popping tablets? i don't. i would advise people not to touch them because it's not worth it. john paul was 36. a year on, the bedroom where he died remains virtually untouched. he was killed by a combination of powerful drugs — the painkiller dihydrocodeine, the heroin substitute methadone, and etizolam, also known as fake valium, a drug linked to nearly 300 deaths across scotland in 2017. it's these kinds of cocktails that are killing record numbers in the area. i'mjustin murray. i'm the service manager for the nhs addiction service.

you would describe it as polysubstance use now, in that there's more than one substitute used. that's the big difference over the sort of, i would say, from five years in to this point — and the drugs that they're accessing are different drugs, as well, so, predominantly, before, it would have been iv heroin use and smoked heroin use we would have seen, but now we're seeing a lot more pill taking and things like that. how does it affect you on a personal level? it's in your community — it's right there in your face. the one thing that we are going against is the kind of moral baggage in scotland around drug deaths. who really ca res if a drug user dies? you may feel that about that individual, but that individual is a son, is a daughter, is a father, and other people are affected, so there's this big ripple effect when a drug death happens. so although we might say there's been ten drug deaths recently here, you think of the amount of people that those ten deaths have affected. that's cold!

no! there were times she would clean up and get dry, but it would always be there. she would liven up, you know, get back to looking after her hair and her nails, and just being that girl again, and then you'd get the dip, and then that's when you would notice that it would come round, you know, so that was the big change. you had incidents where she was very violent to me. when i was in my car one day, erm, she wanted to meet me in the town, and she wanted money, and i said to her, i said, "kym, i'm not giving you money. "i'll get you something to eat. i'll get you some food, but..." no, i didn't approve at the time

of giving her money — and my car window was open, and she violently attacked me, and ripped my hair out of my head and punched me and kicked me, and ijust... i couldn't... i was so shocked that that was my own child doing that, and ijust didn't recognise her. in dumfries, we met vanessa. she's spent nearly half her life hooked on one drug or another. if you see the polis, you're driving off. oh, i've been a heroin userfor years, from the age of about 22, 23. mm—hm. so my life's basically been prison, heroin, prison, heroin. never had a job, never worked. did nothing. basically wasted my life. do you feel that you've wasted your life? i've wasted...

i have totally wasted my life. oh, i've been off heroin for about a year and a half now, but i was taking a few street tablets like pregabalin but no' anything... no' as much now because the death rates went right through the roof with the pregabalin and the valium and the xa nax. see, that's more the era now. that's what it is. it's no' the heroin — it's more tablets. so are you seeing people that you know taking them? aye. i'm seeing people dying through them. i've been there while folk has died in my house... so it's horrible. it is replacing heroin, maybe cos of the cheapness or probably the better dunt. for me, it's a... it's a better dunt, because the heroin nowadays, it's nothing. you don't get a dunt at all. well, i certainly don't get a dunt off it. i wouldnae waste a tenner on it. nah. i would rather have a couple of tablets, as i said, but nowadays, as i'm saying, it's getting more deaths and i'm thinking, "0h, it's about time you stopped now,

va nessa . " cos, nah, there's far too many folk dying and, as i say, you don't know what's round the corner. cos i'm 39, and i've been nearly dead. i'll see you later, right? the pills vanessa's taking aren't supposed to be bought and sold on the street. most of them are prescription drugs, quite safe — and legal — if taken as meant, but here it's their abuse and mixing with other drugs that is killing people. we've got dihydrocodeine, which is a moderate painkiller. we've also got diazepam, which is a... it's taken for anxiety and a muscle relaxant. we've got pregabalin here and gabapentin. now, these are going to change in the way they are scheduled, and in april next year they're going to be classed

as a controlled drug, and this is because they've been... you know, they've been subject to abuse. i mean, they're normally prescribed for epilepsy and also neuropathic pain. what happens is they'll take them, and rather than take them, like, maybe one twice a day, one three times a day as they're prescribed, they'll probably take half a dozen, ten at a time, and it sort of gives them the feeling of, erm, you know, relaxing them and things like that, you know, and... but that on top of taking other medication can obviously cause problems. what would happen is if they were taking, say, an opiate like methadone or heroin and then they took the pregabalin on top, their breathing would get shallower, and then they would just stop breathing. when you die with drugs in your system, a group of experts gets together to work out the exact cause. in december, this review group in dumfries and galloway met to discuss recent deaths in the area. we're starting to see a bigger

increase in the likes of cocaine and in tablet, sort of, form medication rather than the opiate. they're still obviously getting involved in the opiate abuse. it's confirmed that all seven were killed by drugs. the commonest drug that we see, or type of drug that we see leading to death is an opiate. it's heroin or sometimes morphine, and that, again, was the case — we saw that with a lot of the cases we discussed this afternoon. another drug that, really, this is, at this meeting, it's the first time i've seen so many cases, but it's the drug xanax, which is often talked about. that's a benzodiazepine, erm, a special kind of sedative drug. it's not available on the nhs in the uk. it can't be prescribed by doctors here. it is available in places like the united states, and we are seeing quite a bit of it in dumfries and galloway, and it's obviously being sourced somehow on the black market, possibly via the dark web — but this xanax business, that's really quite new.

we haven't seen that in dumfries and galloway before. i think i can remember maybe one or two deaths ever, previously, that involved xa nax, whereas from today, we really saw a lot — a lot more thanjust two. "i shouldn't have had to bury my son — he should have buried me." the words of a distraught dumfries father as he issues a warning." there's still a lot of shame around drugs. this father wanted to talk to us, but didn't want to identify himself or his son. i'm looking at an article that i wrote into the dumfries courier. ijust hoped that if my article could save one life, then my son's death won't be in vain.

"i was woken up by a knock on my door at 4am by the police, "who brought me the news that my son had died of an overdose. "he was a drug user. "he was on methadone and he mixed it with xanax, "a most lethal combination. "mixing drugs is like playing russian roulette with your life. "my son is gone now, "but i want to tell this story to warn others of the dangers. "i don't want what happened to my son to happen to anyone else." i had tried to call her on the thursday, and i couldn't get an answer. anyway, nobody had seen her or heard from her, so i spoke with family and i said, "look, i'm going to go up tomorrow morning. "i'm going to get up tomorrow and i'm going to go and see just..."

but i think, by the friday night, i sort of knew, and i thought to myself, "i think she's lying in that flat." years ago, when we were younger, only two policemen come to tell you when somebody's dead, so we just... ijust saw the lady coming herself, the policewoman, and she stopped out there, and i went to the gate, and i said, "well, she's obviously ok, then, cos there's no' two of yous," and she went, "i'm really sorry." just... i just knew. ijust cried, and... burst out crying and shouting, angry... just devastated, totally devastated. i'd just been talking to her a couple of days before, you know, a couple of nights before, and she kissed me and she said, "i love you, mum," and she went into the flat and i told her, just, "you know, we're here. we're just a mile away. "we're always here at

the end of the phone." that was the last time she spoke. so, one of the things that we noticed when we were looking at the drug—related deaths in dumfries and galloway over the last couple of years was the social connections between a lot of the people. a lot of them moved in the same circles, and they all knew each other, even through social media. so we're looking at this particular chap. he's died in early 2018 from a drug overdose, we know that, erm, but then when you go to look through his friends, it's...

just look at it here. it's... this guy here has died. she's dead. his brother's dead. he's dead. the guy in the picture's dead. this guy here's dead. these two guys next to each other, they're both dead — and all of them have died in the last couple of years after taking a combination of heroin or methadone and the pills, but when you see them all clustered together like that, it's quite stark. first base in dumfries is a support centre at the front line of this growing crisis. for 15 years, its volunteers have witnessed both the change in how drugs are being abused, and the devastating impact on the community.

the most common one we now see is valium, and it's not a drug of choice, it's a drug of price. valium tends to be on sale for 50p a pill. widely on sale for 50p a pill. so, quite often, we'll see people who are on a sort of mix of methadone, which is free, care of the nhs, alcohol, the cheapest they can buy, and valium, because it's cheap — and so, the people with drug problems — and we still see plenty — are kind of invariably between the ages of 30 and 60, and they're ones who were 18, 19, when we first met them back in 2003. many of the same people — and, sadly, many of them are not going to walk through the door any more, cos they've gone. they've died as a result of those drug problems. how many of the people that you've dealt with over the years have passed away? it would be well over 100. it is extraordinary that, you know,

we've lost so many people, and yet it's kind of almost gone unnoticed. i came to first base in about 2008. i started volunteering in the veterans' garden. i was hooked on methadone, valium and cannabis at the time. ijust decided enough was enough. i went and got clean. back in the day, when i first started, you'd have to roam the streets for maybe a couple of hours before you found what you are looking for. you don't now. go onto instagram, go onto facebook, go onto whatsapp. two minutes, i'm sorted. two minutes — and maybe another 20 minutes later, it's delivered to me. it's too simple now. there's a chap here called benzo king, who is, i presume,

selling benzodiazepines. there's a chap on here who's posted pictures of his last batch, which was on the 15th of december, 2018. there's also a man on here called diaz aman. he's based in london, and he's posted a batch which was on the 2nd of november. all in plain sight. i can't believe that it's actually so blatant on social media like that. is it really that easy? we found hundreds of accounts on facebook openly advertising pills, from diazepam and pregabalin, to xanax. we made contact, and 36 hours later, a delivery arrived. so, we're just on our way to pick up a package that's been sent to us by one of the dealers that we'd been

in contact with. we contacted a guy on facebook — we'd never met — and asked him to send us xanax. within 25 minutes, he agreed to send it. a day and a half later, it's in my hand. it's drugs like this that are killing people in scotland, and that's how easy it is to get ahold of it, via facebook. it's incredible. 0ur dealer said he was 100% legit, but the same can't be said for his drugs. we had them tested. the pills were branded as xanax,

but they were fake. they were actually the tranquilliser etizolam. more than 900 people were killed by drugs in scotland in 2017. nearly one third of them had ta ken etizolam, including john paul in sanquhar. so we contacted facebook and asked them to come on this programme for an interview. they've said no, but they've given us this statement. "after a thorough review, we identified and removed 11 accounts related to the contact the bbc brought to our attention, and fanned out to remove an additional 16 accounts associated with these profiles involved in similar activity." so that's 27 accounts. we found more than 200. facebook says there is more it can do. if the trade of drugs on social

media sites is so blatant, so easy, if deadly pills can be sent straight through the post, then what can the police do about that? in recent months, we have probably taken out several thousand tablets which we suspect are xanax — and we took them out the postal system. i think it would be naive to think that the availability of drugs isnae going to increase with the advent of the internet, and it's been slowly increasing over the years. i'm very conscious that enforcement alone isnae really going to solve the problem. we've been doing that for years and years, and it is an important part of dealing with the drugs, but there's a bigger picture, you know, the unfortunate reality is that we're never going to prevent all drugs deaths. we need to try our best to reduce them as much as we can, but again, it would be naive to think we're going to eliminate it completely. why are you doing this today? i would just like if it helped any one family, or person,

or young person that's got children, and is in this life, to think... about what it does, and the bigger scale of it all. no happy ending ever comes with a drug story. it always ends up sad. these children have lost everything through drugs, everything. and... just going through it is just your worst nightmare. for a mother orfather, sister, brother, grandparents, it's just your worst nightmare. and it's waste. a waste of life... and it's no life. last year, scotland recorded the highest number of drug deaths in its history, yet the world keeps turning. they shout.

the drug trade carries on, taking lives with ever—greater ease. this is just one community, just one set of stories. yet today, we are more connected than ever before, and the way we consume drugs is changing. this isn't some far away place. this is probably your town.