Inside 'Blue Plague' drug factory as crime gang member caged for flooding Scotland with pills

dailyrecord.co.uk:

An industrial unit in a small Scots village was turned into a mass-scale drugs factory capable of producing hundreds of thousands of 'Blue Plague' pills in just an hour before a gang member was busted by police in a raid.

Derek Dragsnes ran the unit in the Lanarkshire village of Salsburgh, which was flooding the black-market with street Valium.A police search in October 2021, which took officers 16 days to complete, uncovered pill manufacturing equipment spread out over six rooms at the Springfield Road premises.

Images of giant machinery and equipment produced in court revealed the massive scale of the operation.The 49-year-old, from Glasgow, was jailed for four years and six months at the High Court in Livingston today, after pleading guilty at a hearing last month at the High Court in Edinburgh with being concerned in the supply of etizolam, which was aggravated by his connections to serious organised crime.Prosecutors told the court how it was immediately clear that the property was being used as an etizolam lab on a commercial scale for Dragness's illegal scheme after officers forced entry with a search warrant.

One room contained a pill press machine capable of producing 171,000 tablets per hour. In another, officers seized 53.3kg of white powder containing etizolam, which is known as street Valium.