They were young, bored, disaffected, socially deprived and unemployed – and easy prey for dealers who peddled in misery and promised them heroin would take them away from all their troubles.
Once in its grip, addicts found they needed £50 a day to feed their habit, so they turned to crime.
Unless you were wealthy, the options for funding your habit meant steal, sell or deal. Addicts turned to prostitution, raided houses, mugged people in the street or were sucked into dealing to pay off their debts.
Opiates as a recreational drug had been in use for centuries in the Far East but heroin itself wasn’t invented until 1874.
It started life as a cough medicine and by the time doctors noticed its addictive and destructive properties, it was already too late.
The criminal underworld had seen an opportunity to make money – supply and demand drove their business and lined their pockets.
Disgraced Bay City Rollers boss and sex fiend Tam Paton was using his fame to bolster his already considerable fortune by selling drugs to Edinburgh’s addicts.
Distributed by his “chickens” – the nickname he gave to the army of young boys he surrounded himself with – all the proceeds would go back to Paton, who died in 2009.
The HQ for his operation was his sprawling Little Kellerstain home in Gogar, to the west of the city – where his gang of young men would live before spreading out through the city each day to dish out supplies to addicts.
Paton was convicted for drug offences but always claimed he had no knowledge of the heroin flooding the city’s streets.
And although he was a big player in Edinburgh’s drug trade, a new and more dangerous breed of violent druglords was on the prowl.
Robert Carse was a notorious drug kingpin in the city – and drove around in a top-of-the-range Jaguar on the proceeds of the evil trade.
Another major heroin dealer, who we cannot name for legal reasons, first came to police attention as a youngster growing up in the city’s tough Craigmillar estate.
He was jailed for eight years in 1974 for the attempted murder of a rival when he was a member of the infamous Niddrie Terror street gang.
But in 1987, it was his arrest and imprisonment for being involved in the second-biggest heroin haul in Edinburgh that propelled him into the big leagues.
Officers who burst into a house in Stockbridge found him in bed with the wife of a fellow gang member.
While officers detained him, his sidekick Raymond Smith was being pursued in a high-speed car chase in which he almost killed young children in his desperate bid to escape.
When arrested, Smith refused to co-operate but finally caved in and became a supergrass, pointing the finger at his superiors in the. gang.
Smith’s evidence sent his boss away for 12 years but not before he was repeatedly stabbed and almost died in an attack the night before the trial was due to start.
In the same court, the big boss was convicted of supplying heroin while he was a prisoner in Barlinnie Prison’s special unit.
While dealers like Paton and others were living off the proceeds of their dealing, something worrying was happening in the capital.
The city was facing a public health emergency that would see it labelled the AIDS capital of Europe.
The habit of injecting and sharing needles took off in Edinburgh in a trend not being seen in any other countries across the continent. Pathologists were reporting a sudden rise in the deaths of young people, doctors were seeing huge numbers of cases of hepatitis, endocarditis and abscesses among the city’s youth.
As crime rose, police cracked down hard. Drugs was seen as a driver of crime rather than a health emergency and officers responded as such.
Edinburgh’s courts were overrun with dealers and users as police tried to fight an enemy they had no prior knowledge of. Their tactics, although they couldn’t know it at the time, were counter-productive.
As the law took a heavy-handed approach, the drug was pushed further underground.
Meanwhile, medical professionals couldn’t agree on how to tackle the problem – a surgical supply shop in the city was forced to close after selling low-cost needles to addicts in an effort to stop sharing.
Paul, a former addict who lived in Muirhouse, the scene of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, said: “There’s not many guys my age left. I’m 54 this year and most of the guys I grew up with died during the 80s or died early because of their addictions.
“I was one of the lucky ones, I got off heroin and off the methadone. I’ve been on and off benefits, sometimes I work, but I don’t keep good health.
“I didn’t get AIDS but most of my pals died from it or hepatitis. I’m surprised I’ve got to this age, to be honest. We didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for. Life in Muirhouse wasn’t great, we couldn’t get work, we got the bare minimum to live on and we were bored. It was easy to score a bag of kit and then you got high and forgot about everything anyway. We had some great times.”
He added: “Everyone hated us. We were the junkies, the lowest of the low. Nowadays, there’s better help for people but back then nobody cared.
“There were some do-gooders who would lend you a hand but it took years for any kind of help.
“I was still doing smack in my 40s. We’re called the Trainspotters after Welsh’s book but the reality was worse than anything in there.
“I feel sad when I think of all the guys who are dead. What a waste of a life.”
