FOR THE 1,700 inhabitants of Kingussie, there is normally little to gossip about other than the latest new neighbours from England, attendance levels at the local line-dancing classes and the next bingo tea for the village shinty club.

This week the tiny community, on the banks of the River Spey and between the Cairngorm and Monadhliath mountains, is being forced to confront a topic that is threatening to tarnish its image as a remote Highland idyll: drugs.

The 393 pupils at Kingussie High School are to be subjected to random drug checks by police sniffer dogs.

Two other nearby schools are likely to follow suit after the Northern Constabulary gave warning that, even in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses, the area used to film the television drama Monarch of the Glen, the smoking of cannabis “is replacing a cigarette behind the bike shed”.

Although the use of police sniffer dogs has already been trialled in inner-city schools in England, the decision to replicate this in the Highlands has sent shockwaves across Scotland, where Kingussie High is the first school to introduce the practice.

An English resident, who asked not to be named but who has been living in Kingussie since 1998, said: “It may not look like the kind of place where there would be drugs, but it’s going on here, just like everywhere else. You hear all sorts of stories.”

Although Kingussie High School does not have a history of drug problems, there have been rumours that cannabis is being smoked in the grounds and some pupils have started to experiment with hard drugs.

One community worker told The Times that several local youths were being treated for drug misuse, while there had been an increasing number of seizures in the area.

Police believe that a range of drugs, from cannabis to heroin, is coming in from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and occasionally straight from London. Last October police seized £70,000 of heroin after stopping a car on the A9.

A month later officers recovered heroin worth £21,000 after searching two men as they stepped off a London train at Aviemore.

Kingussie is by no means the only community in the Highlands that can no longer pretend it is unaffected by the drug culture of modern Britain.

According to the Scottish Drug Misuse Database, the number of new patients seeking treatment on the NHS in the Highlands jumped by 70 per cent to 319 in 2003-04.

The increase in the Highlands was the biggest percentage rise of any administrative area of Scotland with the exception of Orkney. During the past five years the number of new patients here has exploded by nearly fivefold. In 2003 the number of drugs-related crimes jumped by 11.2 per cent in the Highlands, compared with a rise of just 0.21 per cent across Scotland as a whole.

David Bell, an NHS consultant specialising in drug addiction, said last month that heroin was “spreading like a tide in the Highlands and Islands”. The warning came after Alastair MacDonald, the governor of Porterfield Prison in Inverness, said that the drug culture was “spreading like a cancer” in the Highlands.

Donna Munro, outreach co-ordinator with the Blast Drug Project, which provides advice to substance users across the Highlands, believes that the region is in a state of denial.

Although she admits that the problem is still slight compared with that in Britain’s big cities, she says it has been “way underestimated”. She said: “People need to accept that it’s a problem. The Highlands is such a lovely, peaceful place that people think it doesn’t go on, but it does.”

This summer, timed to coincide with the school holidays, Blast will launch a full-time mobile advice service in the Highlands.

Using a van that will park in village streets and narrow country lanes, former drug addicts will be sent into some of the most isolated areas of Scotland to provide free information and counselling.

Ryan Smith, 29, a former heroin addict from Inverness, said: “If you look around this place it is like paradise, but there’s an undercurrent here that most people try to ignore.

“The problem just seems to be getting swept under the carpet.”

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