A mother’s grief as heroin death stuns islanders


The scale of heroin addiction in Scotland’s remote islands has been exposed after a court case which ended with a man being jailed for supplying drugs to a teenage friend who died after she suffered an overdose.Megan Chapman appeared to have shaken off her addiction to heroin and the 17-year-old was about to begin a dream job at a stables near her home in Lerwick, the main town of Shetland. But she died at the home of a local addict and friend, Christopher Leask, after a fatal dose of the drug.Megan’s death stunned Shetland. The islanders were forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: despite Shetland’s prosperity, its remoteness from Britain’s cities and low crime, heroin had taken a grip, couriered in by drug gangs from Liverpool and Glasgow. And it exposed surging rates of heroin abuse among under-25s. Leask, 34, was jailed yesterday for nearly two years. The judge, Sheriff Graeme Napier, said he struggled to understand Leask’s behaviour. “You invited the girl round for dinner and in preparation you went out to buy a bag of heroin where others would’ve bought a bottle of wine.”
Via www.guardian.co.uk