Bereaved families demand reform to UK’s outdated drug laws

“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.

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.”

My boys weren’t bad boys. They just wanted to have a bit of fun on a night out, that shouldn’t have killed them

Ray Lakeman from the Isle of Man agrees that a moral stance on drugs has no place in policy. “If we’re genuine about wanting to keep people safe we should look at our existing laws and change them,” he says. Lakeman lost both his sons, Jacques, 20 and Torrin, 19 in December 2014. The boys had gone to watch a football match, taken some MDMA and died together.

“At the inquest, a ‘recreational dose’ of ecstasy was referenced, and it was found that what my boys had taken had far exceeded that,” Lakeman says.

If they’d even known what a recreational dose was, he adds, they might still be here.

“We’re just ordinary people and our voices need to be heard,” Lakeman continues. “My boys weren’t bad boys. They just wanted to have a bit of fun on a night out, that shouldn’t have killed them.”

The campaigners were joined outside Parliament by Reverend Jon Canessa of Newcastle Cathedral. He supports the introduction of safe injecting spaces, having often found drug users unconscious in the cathedral toilets.

“My faith teaches me to love my neighbour,” he says, “and one of the ways we do that is to make sure they don’t die.”

Canessa leads Newcastle Cathedral’s Lantern Initiative, which seeks to support vulnerable people, including those who are experiencing homelessness, living with addiction or poor mental health.

He says: “As part of my role I help support people with problematic drug addiction… and I can see that almost without exception they’ve experienced trauma, grief, loss and pain and for many of them the nature of their addiction is rooted in trying to cope with that.

“To me, it feels like a profoundly unjust response for our laws to see that as an issue of criminality rather than an issue of public health and wellbeing.”

This sentiment is echoed by Hilary Mills, whose son Ben died of a heroin overdose in the toilet of his supported accommodation at the age of 27. She says that too often the onus is on “changing the behaviour, rather than the ‘why’ behind the behaviour”.

Mills adds that she is here “not just to talk about the people who are dying, but about the destruction [drug laws] cause. I work on a drugs helpline and recently spoke to a 76-year-old mother who has been trying to help her child struggling with addiction for 30 years. Surely there’s a better way than this?”

For some, it feels like change is coming – more than 50 cross-party MPs support the call for urgent reform – but any progress is monumentally slow. There’s a reason why Anyone’s Child’s slogan is ‘We talk, they die’.

The Greens are currently the only major party with a policy to legalise and regulate all drugs, using models that ensure there are no profit incentives. For instance, says Zoe Garbett, the party’s candidate for Mayor of London, the NHS should be able to produce its own medical cannabis.

I support people with addiction… most have experienced trauma, grief, loss and pain. Their addiction is rooted in trying to cope

“We’ve got people who are meant to be able to access cannabis on prescription in this country who can’t, yet the UK is also the world’s biggest exporter [of legal cannabis for medical and scientific purposes] and people make a profit from that,” she told openDemocracy. “That inequality is so stark and our approach to cannabis on a global level is becoming increasingly embarrassing.”

Labour MP Jeff Smith agrees: “How can a lot of the US states be more progressive than the UK? Many Western democracies are changing their policies and we need to take notice of what is happening and learn lessons.”

One such lesson, say groups such as the social action network Blaksox, is that legalisation alone will not eradicate racial disparities. In Washington DC, for instance, where cannabis has been legal since 2012, police are still more likely to arrest Black people for cannabis-related offences such as public consumption.

Transform Drug Policy Foundation (TDPF) and Blaksox have created an allyship to demand that if and when the UK finally reforms its drug laws, the voices of Black people are amplified in the process. And one thing policymakers must understand, says Blaksox founder, Viv Ahmun, is that “money is an integral part of any policy change process”.

In New York, for instance, where a 2021 move to legalise recreational cannabis is expected to bring in $350m in tax revenue annually, 40% of this money will be reinvested into the minority communities disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs. This was the model advocated for by Ahmun, who last year visited the US state with TDPF to see the benefits first-hand. Today he says, he has been convinced by a not-for-profit model over a commercialised one, but that this must be one with a social equity element, in which any money made is funnelled into social purpose-orientated initiatives.

But Ahmun, says he is both “an optimist and a pragmatist”. So while last year he estimated it would take two years for the UK to legalise cannabis, today he thinks it could be as many as 11. Just last week, Rishi Sunak’s government rejected the Scottish government’s proposal to decriminalise drugs for personal use, a move that Jane Slater, deputy chief executive officer and campaign manager of Anyone's Child says they are “heartbroken” by.

“It’s time for Scotland and the rest of the UK to move forward and take a new approach to drugs,” Slater says, “to save lives and help keep families together.”