Take a walk across the playparks, wastelands and housing estates of Glasgow's East End or the wilds of Lanarkshire and it won't be long before you stumble across an empty Buckfast bottle. Known as Commotion Lotion, Wreck the Hoose juice, and most commonly Buckie, Buckfast tonic wine is the drink of choice for a certain kind of gallus guy or girl – known colloquially as a ned – in the west of Scotland, especially Lanarkshire.

This week, a court will consider whether the marking of bottles of Buckfast with an anti-crime sticker is stigmatising the brand and those who drink it. Suppliers of the potent tonic wine have described as "ethnic cleansing" the Strathclyde police scheme to track the point of sale of bottles that may have been involved in crime. But the police don't pursue this without evidence: between 2006 and 2009, Buckfast was linked to 5,638 crimes in the Strathclyde police area, and was used 114 times as a weapon. Earlier this month, a 26-year-old man was convicted of attacking a nine-year-old girl with a Buckfast bottle in Glasgow, leaving her scarred for life.

Buckfast is no longer a "cheap" tipple. The swiftness of intoxication from the high alcohol and caffeine content can mean the drinker is very quickly ready to have a square go: a "swally" of Buckie brings on hyperactivity and bravado, a kind of "bouncing" that many can't get enough of, and often this is followed by violence and aggression.

The sticker scheme was piloted four years ago and its success is still open to question: supermarkets don't participate and small-shop vendors can choose which bottles they stick it to. Buckfast tonic wine – produced by Benedictine monks in Devon – argues that this is stigmatising the brand. Yet it is their own bright yellow label that lies discarded in the streets, and is brandished like a badge by its drinkers. Yes, it is one of a few brands in the "electric soup" range of powerful intoxicants, but it is by far the most popular and the connection to crime and violence speaks for itself.

But it is this connection that leads the monks and their spokesman, Jim Wilson, the director of the tonic wine's distributor, J Chandler & Co, to claim that they are being unfairly scapegoated. In a 2010 BBC Scotland documentary, The Buckfast Code, Wilson elaborated on a conspiracy that the police, the health service and the prison service blamed Buckfast for crime and other social ills because they had "political lords and masters and they all get paid by the government". Statistics that found that 40% of youths in Polmont young offenders' institution had been drinking Buckfast before their offence were part of this plot.

But most other brands of alcohol don't contain such enormously high amounts of caffeine: each bottle of Buckfast contains 281mg of this adrenaline-pumping, psychoactive drug. Mix this with 15% alcohol and the other nickname, "loopy juice", doesn't seem unfounded.

Wilson will argue that it is irresponsible drinkers abusing the drink, but by the same turn he must surely know his is not a beverage served at soigne dinner parties in Hyndland. Buckfast was once a cheap and easy hit favoured by the poor but it now costs more than a low-end bottle of wine. Still it sells by the bucketload – 2012 saw Buckfast's turnover rise by £1.3m. The monks must know by now who make up a proportion of their customers and why they drink their product.

Strathclyde police have been criticised for pandering to middle-class prejudice about the drink, but the outcry comes from the parents of those who are in its thrall, as well as from Scottish politicians and health specialists across the board. If stickering Buckfast leads the police to solving even one crime, or acts to make the "Buckie Heads" think twice about their actions, if they may be caught, then surely it's a scheme worth pursuing. One less scarred face, one less life ruined would be worth it. Apply it to all alcohol if it makes the scheme more egalitarian. It's only a tiny wee sticker after all.

Buckfast is a drink that is wrapped up in the mythology, the stereotypes and the reality of west-of-Scotland life. And it has a stigma all of its own making.