In a news item which must have strayed from a spike of earlier this year, BBC Wales reported some grisly figures from Neath Port Talbot. In 2016, this area recorded the second-highest death toll in England and Wales from misuse of drugs. This confirms the anecdotal evidence from the Ferret and the Neath Facebook pages that the effects of illegal drug-taking - victims on the streets and paraphernalia found in alleys and children's play areas - are more evident here than in any other place in Wales.
A further bit of ferreting on my part confirmed a suspicion that Blackburn and Burnley (numbers one and three on the drug mortality league table) were, like Neath and Port Talbot, high on the list of Leave-voting towns also. At the root of both sets of statistics is a sense of despair.
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