This is an absolute scandal, and a textbook example of what happens when people spend other people's money without being held properly accountable for it. £642,000 of taxpayers' money allocated to tackling Scotland's addiction crisis, and the public bodies responsible cannot produce sufficient evidence to demonstrate precisely how it was spent. Not £642. Not £6,420. Nearly two-thirds of a million pounds. A quarter of Aberdeenshire's alcohol and drug funding. And here's the truly astonishing part. Auditors raised serious concerns in 2022. Four years later, the same fundamental failures remain. What exactly have these people been doing for four years, apart from attending meetings, producing reports and collecting salaries? Milton Friedman famously described the problem of spending other people's money on other people. When you're spending your own money, you have a powerful incentive to control costs and demand value. When you're spending taxpayers' money, those incentives can become remarkably weak, particularly when there are no personal consequences for failure. Scotland's addiction bureaucracy appears determined to prove his point. Of course, the auditors haven't established that the money was stolen or misspent. They've established something quite damning enough: the system cannot provide adequate assurance about how substantial public funding was used. And NHS Grampian's response is breathtaking. Apparently, changing the funding arrangements would create financial difficulties elsewhere. So institutional financial convenience becomes an argument for maintaining arrangements that auditors have identified as fundamentally inadequate. You really couldn't make it up. Imagine a small recovery charity telling its funder that it couldn't adequately account for a quarter of its funding, despite having been warned about its financial controls four years earlier. Its funding would be at risk, its governance questioned and its trustees expected to explain themselves. Yet when it's the NHS and the addiction bureaucracy, we get another improvement plan and assurances that lessons will be learned. This is institutional incompetence protected by institutional privilege. Meanwhile, 1,133 people died drug-related deaths in Scotland last year. Families are burying their children, parents and partners while the institutions entrusted with tackling this catastrophe struggle to demonstrate where the money goes, never mind whether it's changing lives. And that's the deeper scandal. We've created a system that can tell us how much money it has been allocated, how many committees have met and how many strategies have been published, but apparently cannot always demonstrate what the public has received in return. The money doesn't belong to NHS Grampian, the Alcohol and Drugs Partnership or the officials administering it. It belongs to the public. It was allocated for the benefit of people whose lives are being devastated by addiction. Yet those whose money funds the system have little meaningful oversight, while those whose lives depend upon it are left wondering what difference any of this expenditure has made. Four years of warnings. £642,000 without adequate financial assurance. Another 1,133 people dead. And where is the personal accountability? At what point does incompetence become grounds for dismissal rather than another taxpayer-funded action plan? Other people's money. Other people's lives. Apparently nobody's responsibility. pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/new…