The Changing Drugs Debate

EVERY MOTHER'S WORST NIGHTMARE

Mary Riddell On The Private Hell Behind A Very Public Death

Once there was heroin chic. Its catwalk disciples had shadowed eyes, chalk
faces and cadaverous cheeks. If they were high on anything, it was a
cocktail of champagne, Marlboro Lights and irony. Now there is only heroin
shock. The pictures of Rachel Whitear, killed at 21 with a syringe in her
hand, are distressing both as an illustration of the ravages of death and
for their contrasting tableau of a deeply normal life.

In the tidiest of student rooms, a girl with shiny hair and a striped dress
crouches in a pose of pain or supplication. She had tried to get off drugs.
Her counsellor saw her as a success story. Yet she died despite her resolve
and the bright future that beckoned before she dropped out of Bath
University. Her mission, ordained by her parents, is that she should now
spare other children a fate from which she could not absolve herself.

Will her cautionary tale, a modern take on Belloc or Hoffman, have a
lasting impact? Current wisdom says yes. Last week the British Medical
Association urged the Government to revive the shock Aids campaigns of the
Eighties. In their absence, sexually transmitted diseases have risen
alarmingly. Complacency kills in a country where fortunes are spent to
promote wrinkle creams and cars, and almost nothing on saving or enhancing
lives.

But the advertising of risk is inexact. What message, exactly, should
teenagers absorb? Rachel's mottled body, complete with 'Just Say No'
subtext, contrasts oddly with other drug stories. On the day Prince Harry
escaped a police caution for smoking dope, an inquest heard how a
high-achieving, 16-year-old boy on cannabis stabbed himself through the
heart with scissors in front of his father.

Real life is too complex for simple analysis of danger. That is why adult
stories of addiction are so sinuous. Sir Anthony Hopkins cannot resist the
suggestion that his life was once enhanced, as well as ravaged, by drink.
Martin Broughton, who heads British American Tobacco, concedes that smoking
is bad for you and he would counsel his children never to take it up.

Such mixed messages typify our ambivalence. Print the anti-smoking notices
small on cigarette packets. Downplay the charge that alcohol abuse costs
the NHS UKP 3 billion a year. But stress the parable of Rachel Whitear, an
emblem of the tragedies that befall our children. Except that she, for all
the prominence of her dying, was the minority of a minority; a privileged
university student who found her nemesis in lethal drugs.

Hers, in the end, is a personal, not a public lesson. Her parents longed no
doubt that other children should not die needlessly. They must have yearned
to give a purpose to an abbreviated life and its crushed promise.

Rachel wanted her organs to help others, but heroin abuse forbade that.
Instead her parents chose to breach the privacy that death normally
accords. No doubt they wished, understandably, that their child should not
live and die in vain.

It is indisputable that newspapers should publish pictures offered to them.
It is also right that editors should understand that such stark images may
have less to say about public duty than about private despair.