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Bereaved families demand reform to UK’s outdated drug laws [1]
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Date: 2023-07
“It’s been ten years since my daughter died,” says Anne-Marie Cockburn, a softly spoken woman wearing a T-shirt reading, ‘My daughter’. “It feels very distorted to say that number. But it has been ten years since I last held my child’s hand.”
Cockburn’s daughter, Martha, died at the age of 15 after taking MDMA. Today, her bereaved mother is part of Anyone’s Child, a network of families impacted by drug-related deaths.
When I meet Cockburn, she is standing outside Parliament alongside 150 others, many of whom are wearing similar T-shirts: ‘My son’, ‘My nephew’, ‘My friend’. All are united not only by the pain of losing a loved one, but in their belief that the UK’s drug laws were to blame for their deaths.
In the 52 years since the Misuse of Drugs Act was introduced, both the availability of drugs and our understanding of them have radically changed. But the prohibition model still stands. Drug production and distribution are in the hands of criminals, many users are ignorant of what they are taking, and addiction is still treated as a criminal matter, rather than a health issue.
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Under this model, drug-related deaths in England and Wales are the highest since records began (4,859 in 2021, a 6.2% increase from 2020). Scotland, meanwhile, has long had the highest drug-related death rate in Europe (245 deaths per million in 2020). More than 50,000 children in England are thought to be involved in county lines drug trafficking. And an estimated £6.9bn per year is spent on policing the so-called ‘war on drugs’ in England alone, enforcing drug laws that disproportionately target Black and Asian people.
As well as bereaved friends and family, the crowd from Anyone’s Child gathered in Westminster includes drug workers, people in recovery and former police officers. They are there to urge Parliament to recognise that drug policy reform is urgent – without it, more people will die.
In Martha’s case, Cockburn explains, drug laws meant that while her teenage daughter had “easy access” to ecstasy, she lacked “a good enough education on it”. Martha had searched how to take the drug safely online, but this was not enough to prevent her from taking five to ten times what would have been considered a safe amount, of a drug that was 91% pure.
Knowing that her daughter was taking ecstasy, Cockburn had also researched how to keep her daughter safe, but the only advice she could find was how to talk her out of it.
What she actually needed, she says, “was information to be empowered to have the conversation to help get Martha home safely” – health advice, for example, such as what a safe dosage of ecstasy would have been for Martha, and warnings such as to drink water but not too much.
Put simply, Cockburn needed the information to allow her to have the type of conversation with her daughter that many politicians and parents might baulk at.
“But I don’t care if people are going to judge me,” Cockburn says. “It’s much harder to talk about my dead daughter than to talk about the safety measures she needed in the moment.
“If I’d been able to have the bravery to ‘go there’, I wouldn’t be standing outside Parliament having this conversation, I would be getting on with my life with a beautiful almost-26-year-old child by my side.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/uk-drug-laws-killing-people-reform-needed-legalisation-scotland-cannabis-mdma-racist-discrimination-/
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