post-lockdown Scotland needs to provide proper funding to battle a potential new rise in drug deaths.Epidemiologist Dr Andrew McAuley says it is inevitable that annual drug death statistics to be published next week will show a further rise in Scotland’s death rate – which is the worst in the world and soared by 27 per cent last year.He warned that post-Covid austerity, coupled with massive unemployment, will spark a wave of social problems that will drive many people to drug use.McAuley, of Glasgow Caledonian University, said: “We have had a period of relative economic excess from the mid-nineties to the mid-noughties and then we’ve had ten years of austerity and we probably haven’t seen the impact of that on substance use fully yet. “But.