CORONER CONDEMNS SOFT LINE ON DRUGS

A CORONER has condemned tolerant attitudes towards drugs after hearing how
heroin killed a father and his baby daughter and left the child's mother in
a coma.

Alan Craze gave a stark warning against accepting the use of drugs at the
end of inquests into the deaths of the addict Michael Morfee, 22, and his
daughter, Summer Louise, who was just five days old. The inquest was told
that Morfee, a former cannabis smoker, and his girlfriend Amy Pickard took
a heroin overdose in June last year in a public toilet in Hastings, Sussex.
Amy, 17, has been in a coma since; the couple's daughter was born by
emergency Caesarean section and died within a week.

Morfee recovered from the overdose but became severely depressed about
Pickard's condition and the death of the baby. Five months later he
returned to the same public toilets and took a fatal dose of heroin.

Mr Craze condemned anyone with a soft approach to drugs. "How can anyone
listening to the facts of cases like these seriously advocate that the use
of these drugs by young and immature people should be facilitated, whether
by changing the law or by so-called tolerance policing or by any other
means?" he said.

Verdict: misadventure in the case of Summer Louise and an open finding on
Morfee.