Fraserburgh hoping Rangers cup tie can help repair town’s image problem | Jake Warren

The Highland League team are out to create positive headlines for a town better known for its heroin epidemic than football

Fraserburgh, or the Broch as locals refer to it, is a small town in north Aberdeenshire with a population just shy of 13,000. It is a place not much paid attention to by the outside world and a cursory Google search will highlight two main points of interest. One, it is a historic fishing port which still provides 60% of employment to the area and has Scotland’s first recorded lighthouse; and two, throughout the 90s and early 2000s it suffered from a heroin epidemic.

Tagged with the unfortunate title of the heroin capital of Britain, Fraserburgh had more than 300 known addicts, which amounted to around 4% of the town. A former local GP, Dr Sandy Wisley, who struggled to deal with the scale of the heroin problem, once remarked: “If I threw a stone now” while driving through the streets, “there’s a one-in-three chance I’d hit a junkie.”

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