Drugs Policy

Layla Moran Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

One of the joys of being called so late in the debate is being able to hear the arguments on both sides. I have found it genuinely informative, and I thank everyone for their contributions, especially those who made maiden speeches today. As a newbie myself, I can only tell them that it does get easier.

We have a very special person in the room with us today—so special, indeed, that she and her campaign have been mentioned at several points during the debate. She is a constituent of mine called Anne-Marie Cockburn, and she is the mother of a child whose name may also be familiar to Members, because she too has been mentioned today. The story is so poignant, and so relevant to everything that we are talking about, that I hope the House will indulge me and allow me to tell it more fully so that everyone can understand why so many Members included it in their speeches, albeit in passing. It is the story of Martha Fernback.

Martha died four years ago this week, on 20 July 2013, from an accidental drug overdose. She was 15. That fateful day, she was out with her friends on a Saturday morning to go to a kayaking club; she was too young for the other sort. She took—because it was so readily available—half a gram of Ecstasy powder, and almost immediately started to react. At first, her friends did not know what to do. They were worried that they would get into trouble, so they hesitated in ringing the ambulance when it was clear that Martha was struggling. But they did. Then Anne-Marie got the call that every parent dreads. An unrecognised number came up on her mobile phone screen; she was called to go to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. Just two hours after first taking the drug, Martha, her beautiful baby girl, died.

What is most extraordinary about this story is that the drug was 91% pure—way above the national average at the time. Martha thought that she was being safe. She tried to protect herself. After her death, Anne-Marie looked at her online history. Martha knew that she wanted to experiment and she knew that there were risks, so she did her research. She had some of the information, which said beware of impurities, but that was not the whole story, as the information was not out there about safe dosage. Besides, she had no idea what she was taking. In a sense, the drug was almost too pure. So she accidentally took too much.

Anne-Marie was a wonderful mother. Martha was her only child—her world. They were close. In fact, Martha confided to her mum that she wanted to experiment—as a teacher, I can tell Members that that is very rare—and Anne-Marie did exactly what we all tell parents to do. She told Martha to “Just say no”. With hindsight, Anne-Marie is clear, and she argues, as part of the Anyone’s Child campaign, that, had Martha taken something legally regulated, with labelled dosage and clear safety information, she could have made a fully informed choice—not a partially informed choice—and, who knows, may even have decided not to do it.

Martha wanted to get high. She did not want to die. Perhaps if she had had all the information, she could have done for herself what her mother could not, and still be with us today.

The story is heart-breaking—I am sure that is why so many Members have referred to it today—but it makes an important point. Ecstasy is already banned, yet such stories still happen. The blanket ban approach is just doing more of the same. It fixes nothing of the core issue and is the wrong approach. Rather than banning and punishing, we should be regulating and educating. Taking drugs should be a public health issue, not a criminal offence, and I am so happy to hear so many Members make that point in the House today. Stories such as Martha’s happen because we refuse to accept that teenagers will always want to take risks. We talk about sending a clear message. How do we best get a teenager to do something? It is by telling them not to do it. I am a teacher and I have educated more than a thousand teenagers. Believe me, if I could wrap every one of them in a protective blanket and shield them from the harm of this world, I would, but if they will not do as you say—and they frequently do not—at least let them be safe in what they do.

Martha’s story is terrifying. It is natural to want to clamp down and stop it happening to anyone at all ever. I have immense sympathy for those who believe that that is the right approach. To hear the Home Secretary say that she wants a drug-free world is laudable, but I am afraid that I believe it is naive and it fundamentally fails to understand how teenagers really think and behave.

One of the reasons the Liberal Democrats argue for decriminalising drugs for personal use is that we want to encourage a proper debate and to encourage users to seek help. Our priority should not be to punish people caught with drugs—perhaps Martha’s friends would have called the ambulance earlier had they not felt that that was a problem. Our priority should be to increase access to treatment for anyone who is suffering from drug dependency.

It is time for us to recognise that our old approaches have not worked and to stop repeating the same mistakes of the so-called “war on drugs” time and again. We need a more constructive and evidence-based approach: one that focuses on education and, when it is needed, on rehabilitation and treatment; and one that will finally take meaningful steps to reduce the harms that drugs have done to too many families across the country.

I urge the Government: let us be brave and open up this debate. We need to wake up and face the facts. Prohibition does not work; all it does is make a natural instinct taboo. It puts up barriers between children and their parents, and it drives the problems underground, and into the hands of drug dealers and gangs who, frankly, could not care less about children like Martha—their customers.

I urge the Government to think again. This is the wrong approach. It did not help Martha then and it will not help others like her now, or in the future.