Irvine Welsh on Scottish drug deaths: We don’t have control over our politics

Trainspotting, the ground-breaking novel by Irvine Welsh, was released 30 years ago (Jane Barlow/PA)

Irvine Welsh has said Scotland’s high level of drug deaths is down to the country not having control of its own destiny and being on the “margins of British society”.

The 64-year-old author rose to fame with the publication of Trainspotting in 1993, a novel about Edinburgh-based young people grappling with drug addiction.