Scots mum Anne-Marie Cockburn is joining other families to demand reform of “outdated” drug laws.
Anne-Marie has dedicated her life to campaigning for change after the death of her daughter Martha, 15, from an accidental ecstasy overdose in 2013.
The writer is joining other drug reformers in Edinburgh today to demand a proper debate on legalisation, focusing on Scotland’s unwanted title of European drug death capital.
Anne-Marie, 52, said: “This debate has moved on massively because if you’d called for the legalisation of drugs a few years ago people would have though you were mad. They would recoil in fear at the thought.
“But the level of deaths now is simply out of control and it is obvious that we need to do things very differently. The dialogue is changing fast.
“The bottom line for me is that I don’t want other families to walk in my shoes and to feel the hurt and loss that I’ve had since Martha died.”
Anne-Marie settled in Oxford after being brought up in Irvine, Ayrshire.
Her life was rocked in 2013, when Martha took half a gram of pure MDMA, the active drug in ecstasy.
The dosage was enough for up to ten adults and killed Martha, who had no idea how much to take or how massive the risk was.
Anne-Marie said: “What we have now is a chaotic situation, where drugs are sourced from criminals and there is no idea of knowing if the drug being taken might be deadly.
“I firmly believe there should be a regulated way of buying drugs, where it is sold legally and strictly regulated, rather than on this black market, where every person who takes part in the trade is criminalised.”
Anne-Marie said Martha had been browsing to find out the safest way to take ecstasy in the weeks before her death.
She said: “She had been looking at the Lancet but the information she was after simply wasn’t there.
“We need to have a society that acknowledges that people will take drugs, usually in a non-harmful way, and which strives to make the taking of drugs as safe as possible.”
Anne-Marie will be married on July 20 this year, ten years after her death.
She will today address an audience at St John’s Episcopal Church, in Edinburgh, which includes some of the UK’s leading drugs reformers.
The event, organised by the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, will include a memorial of 4,517 hand-made forget-me-not flowers for lives lost to drugs in the UK in 2021.
Ian Andrew, ex-police Inspector who now campaigns for drug law reform with Law Enforcement Action Partnership, Scotland, said: “In 32 years of police service enforcing punitive legislation and policies, and watching the availability of illicit drugs increase year on year I realised the legislation was not only not improving matters, it was actually making things worse.
“Taking control of the distribution of drugs and properly regulating that market is the way forward.”
•The ”Take Drugs Seriously” event is at St John’s Episcopal Church, Edinburgh, at 6.30pm on Thursday
