ONE PILL AND ANITA WAS DEAD

While one grieving mother describes the awful death of a daughter
after taking ecstasy, another tells SANDRA LAVILLE how she turned
detective to track down the schoolyard pusher who had terrorised and
ensnared her son

SITTING in the living room of her house, Elaine Gair stares blankly at
a collection of photographs. They portray her daughter Anita variously
as a baby, on the day she first wore her school uniform, by the tree
during a happy family Christmas, playing the fool with her friends and
relaxing on a variety of sunshine holidays - evolving gradually but
unmistakably from a girl into a vivacious young woman.

It is a desperate attempt to blot out a very different but indelible
image she has of Anita. Mrs Gair's abiding memory is of her daughter
aged 17, lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to a life-support machine,
her body swollen and bloated and her left arm covered in a blood blister.

"I can look at pictures, but the only picture in my head is how she
was in hospital for those two days, when she died and then in the
chapel of rest. I just can't picture her before that," says Mrs Gair.

Anita was born on March 18, 1982, the youngest of two daughters. With
her sister, Kirsty, she attended Arrow Vale High School in Redditch in
the West Midlands, where she passed 10 GCSEs. By the time she left
school, she had built up a close circuit of schoolfriends and their
social life revolved around nothing more dramatic than a night out in
their local pub. As her mother talks about her, she laughs when she
remembers Anita's favourite night out. "It would be a few pints of
beer and a balti curry," she says.

The words bubbly and headstrong are repeated constantly as Mrs Gair
describes Anita. She had always adored animals and in her usual
compelling way she persuaded her mother to allow her to buy her a
snake just before her 16th birthday. She kept it in an aquarium in her
bedroom.

Her bedroom at home, where she lived with her parents and Kirsty, 19,
is like that of any 17-year-old girl. Anita, a Manchester United fan,
had stuck pictures of her heartthrob, Ryan Giggs, on the walls. On her
desk, a heated hair curler sits where she left it. Her make-up is
scattered around the desk top - moisturiser, perfume and mascara.

In the wardrobe hangs a strappy black sundress and a Ben Sherman
shirt. Both still have their price tags on. In her top drawer is an
unworn bikini. She had bought the clothes for a holiday she booked to
go on last week to Ibiza with her boyfriend. Now, the wallet which
contained her airline tickets lies discarded in the wastepaper bin.

Mrs Gair says: "When she left school she went to agricultural college,
where she began to study to become a veterinary nurse. But then she
got interested in psychology and wanted to use it to work with
animals. She began working on Saturdays at Pet Smart, a shop in Redditch."

As her college course developed and it was time to look for work
experience, Anita decided to do four days a week at the pet shop.

"She was always really busy. She had her college work, her work
experience and her job, so she didn't have much time to go out," says
Mrs Gair.

At Pet Smart Anita met a new group of friends who were two to three
years older. She started going out with a 19-year-old who worked in
the shop and, according to her parents, lost touch with many of her
schoolfriends.

On a Friday night, the routine for the friends from Pet Smart was to
drink in a pub in nearby Worcester and then visit Tramps nightclub and
dance until the early hours.

Anita, like most young people, had received drug education lessons at
school. However, she was probably more knowledgeable than many other
teenagers about the potential dangers because of her father, who
worked in the drugs support unit of Bullingdon Prison at Bicester,
Oxfordshire. "We talk a great deal as a family - we are very close,"
says Martyn Gair. "As well as learning about drugs at school, the
college had drugs awareness days. At one point, they were bringing in
the local police drugs dog just to show the students the work the
officers did. They operated a zero tolerance policy on drugs at the
college. Anyone found with them would have been told to leave.

"We would have conversations as a family about drugs because of the
nature of my job - we talked openly on just about every issue. I would
ask both my daughters about how easy it was to buy drugs in Redditch,
and the answer was it was relatively easy to get them - even at school."

Her mother says: "Anita took the stance that she did not need drugs to
have a good time when she went out. She said that to me and to her
close schoolfriends that she didn't even like smoking - she was
against anything like that."

However, on Friday, May 14 this year, Anita did something which her
parents believe was totally out of character. She took an ecstasy
tablet - her parents are convinced it was her first.

That night, as the music throbbed through one of Worcester's most
popular clubs, all around her other clubbers were dancing. No doubt
many of them were on ecstasy. There was nothing to warn Anita that she
alone among them would, by taking the pill, become another statistic
to stack up against the dance drug. She was just a normal, healthy
teenager.

Some 200,000-400,000 teenagers are estimated to take ecstasy every
weekend and, in the past 10 years, some 78 have died as a result. To
focus on the effects of the drug on one teenager could be seen as
scaremongering, but the Gairs have experienced what the drug can do at
its most devastating.

"We want people to know what the consequences of taking ecstasy can
be," says Mr Gair. "And, quite simply, for Anita the consequence was
death."

With a calculated deliberation, he recounts the last 36 hours of his
youngest daughter's life, as she lay in a coma from the effects of a
single ecstasy tablet.

"Her body had swollen up. She looked like a Michelin man - you could
see all the fluid swelling her, particularly down the left side, where
she was very swollen."

Mrs Gair continues: "She had a large blood blister the size of my hand
on her left arm and blisters on her left eye. Her legs were swollen. I
didn't look at her body - I couldn't look at her body. If people could
see her as we saw her then ... I just still cannot come to terms with
it.

'No one knows the long-term effects,' says Mrs Gair

"I cry, I cry, I cry every day. I just can't accept it. Before the
funeral, I could go into her bedroom, but since then I can't because I
think it's really going to hit me and I don't know what I am going to
do when it does.

"She had so much ahead of her," said her mother. "She had her holiday
to look forward to and she was about to receive A38,000 in
compensation from an accident she had had when she was little. She was
having driving lessons and she was planning to travel a bit with her
money."

It was in the early hours of Saturday morning that Mr and Mrs Gair
were woken by the police at their detached house in the Matchborough
district of Redditch. Mr Gair talks slowly as he remembers the hours
that followed, keen to get every detail as correct as he possibly can.

"It is all a bit hazy, but I'm pretty sure we were just told that our
daughter had collapsed in a nightclub and we had to go to the
hospital. There was nothing mentioned at the time about ecstasy.

"It was about 3.45am when we arrived. We hardly had time to think.
Since her death, we have gathered that she took the ecstasy at 11pm
and at about 1am she was in the toilet being sick - and then collapsed.

"I only found out at Anita's funeral, but one of the staff at Tramps
gave her first aid in the toilet and called the ambulance.

"Things are slightly hazy from when the ambulance came and when we
arrived at the hospital. I am led to believe, though, that she
arrested twice in casualty. Once was for a period of 20 minutes. When
we arrived, she was on a life-support machine. She was on drugs to try
to bring down her blood pressure, which was very high. Her brain had
swollen almost to the limit.

"They took some blood tests and sent them to be analysed, but they
couldn't do anything because the ecstasy hadn't cleared her system. So
we waited through to Sunday morning when the intention was to do more
blood tests. By then, the drug had left her system, but her blood
pressure was still very high.

"Then, just as they were setting up to do a brain stem test, she had
another heart attack. It was noon when she died."

In a drawer of the bureau in their living room, the Gairs keep their
daughter's death certificate. The cause of death is described in a
stark sentence: cardio respiratory arrest as a result of the ingestion
of methylene dioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy).

Mr and Mrs Gair have spoken to the parents of Leah Betts in the weeks
following Anita's death. Like the Bettses, they too want lessons to be
learnt from their daughter's death but are realistic about the impact
one teenager's death can have on the tens of thousands of young people
who take the drug every weekend.

"Ecstasy is very much a young person's drug," said Mr Gair. "If you go
to a club and see the number of people that are taking it - and you
see that nothing adverse is apparently happening to them, then you can
understand why someone might try it. But no one really knows what the
long-term effects on the brain are."

What happened at Tramps only the weekend after Anita's death
illustrates his point. Two boys were taken to hospital after taking
ecstasy. They, however, survived.

"When I heard about those two boys," Mr Gair says, "I was
disappointed, but not shocked, that even the death of our daughter
hadn't made people stop and think."