‘If there was a progressive drug policy in the UK, Martha would still be alive’
It would have made more sense if it wasn’t such a lovely day. Cloudless, blue skies, mid-July, the perfect Saturday. I’d been out shopping and was busy holiday planning, enjoying the start of the weekend, when my teenage daughter, Martha, was swallowing the almost pure ecstasy that would end her life just hours later.
Martha was at kayaking club that morning. She went every Saturday, we’d been texting on and off all day, checking in about our upcoming holiday, laying out our plans. So when my phone lit up I assumed it was going to be her, not an unknown caller who would cut through the noise of everything around me to say: “Your daughter is gravely ill, we are trying to save her life.”
What seemed like an age later I was walking down the A&E corridors in a sort of fugue state. It felt like I was floating. In a small room off the busy corridors, my 15-year-old daughter was fighting for her life. They couldn’t detect a pulse, so I stood in the room and watched on as 12 emergency staff desperately tried to save my daughter’s life, with the help of all this horrific equipment strapped to her chest. There was an intense, desperate focus in the room. And then just like in the films, everything stopped.
She was flatlining. I kept staring at that line, willing it to move. The doctor in charge was scanning the room, flicking his eyes around the circle of people, and I averted my eyes, as if not looking at him might stop him from saying what he was about to say. The only part of Martha that came home after that day was her shoes, returned to me two weeks later by the police.
The reason that half a gram of MDMA (methylenedioxy-methylamphetamin) killed Martha was because of its purity. Around that time, in 2013, the average potency of MDMA passing through the UK was 47 per cent. Martha’s dose was nearly double that. She took what could have been enough ecstasy for five to 10 people, all in one go, simply because she didn’t know any better.
A few weeks previously, we’d had a row where I found out she had taken ecstasy before. I blurted out something like “those pills could contain rat poison, Martha”. So, she tried her best. She did the smart thing, listened to her mum and set about researching the best quality she could find, to try and stay safe. It didn’t work.
This is the problem with drugs. There is no label on them, no recommended dosage, no “take two every four to six hours, with food”. It’s a global problem, but not a problem I personally had with drugs until Martha’s death. It’s been nine years now, and I know one thing for sure – if there was a more progressive drug policy in the UK, Martha would still be alive.
At first, I was sort of frantically searching around, learning about drug policy, incensed by my state of devastation. It alarmed me how, for the last 50 years, everyone seemed to have been crossing their fingers, saying “As long as it’s not my family then I’m not bothered”.
Over time, I realised the full benefits of a progressive drugs policy – it protects the young and the vulnerable and, most importantly, saves lives. It reduces local crime, saves police time and stops public money being wasted on our already overflowing prison system. It costs more than £43,000 a year to keep somebody in prison.
It’s something I felt strongly from the start – even before I held the knowledge I do now. Days after Martha’s death, a 17-year-old boy came forward and handed himself in. When the case got to court, I approached the boy’s barrister and said: “I want to meet him, I want to talk to him. I don’t want him to go to prison.”
I saw him across the court before his sentencing and as soon as I did, all I could think about was the bag he was carrying. I thought, ‘He would have been packing that bag in his bedroom last night, thinking he might be going to prison the next day. What’s in it, is it photos of his family?’ And I didn’t feel angry, not for a second. I was simply exhausted because my life felt as if it was on hold.
After the sentencing hearing, a police officer quietly pulled me aside and said: ‘You know you can appeal the sentence,’ and I simply said: ‘Martha’s dead’. It wasn’t what I wanted, or what she would have wanted. So the boy didn’t go to prison. He was given a supervision order and 50 hours of charity work.
He and I even wrote letters to each other a handful of times, and I will always remember once near the anniversary of Martha’s death, where he told me it affects him every single year. That helped. Not because I wanted to know that he had suffered, but because I wanted to know that she had mattered to him, that her death mattered to him, as it had to me.
Martha’s death was the line in the sand moment of my life. Since her death in 2013, more than 28,847 people in the UK have lost their lives to drug poisoning. Drug-related deaths increase every year. The most recent year on record, 2020, has the highest death rate yet. This is an international emergency. When Martha died, her death had international coverage because it seemed so unusual at the time. These days, you don’t even hear on the news if a 15-year-old dies from taking drugs.
What kind of society is it where we let children die unnecessarily, to the point where it’s no longer newsworthy? Where my daughter can go out on a Saturday and only her shoes come home two weeks later? And the devastated families they leave behind are just left to get on with their lives as if it’s commonplace.
It’s for them that I campaign for a more progressive drug policy, and it’s for people like Martha, who no longer have a voice to do so.
As told to Maddy Mussen.
If you want to join our campaign for safer drug laws, contact Anyone’s Child, a charity and network of families that focuses on safer drug control. If you are personally struggling with drug use, you can get confidential advice from Talk To Frank on 0300 123 6600.
