Families from all over the world will descend on the United Nations headquarters in New York to demand an end to the global drug war.  As the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs meets, representatives from fifty families from Afghanistan, Canada, the Philippines, Kenya, UK, Belgium, Honduras, the US and Mexico gather to tell their stories of loss.

What:

Press conference: 50 families will be represented and 9 families from across the world will tell their personal stories of bereavement and harm resulting from the drug war

Photo opportunity: Just as families and mothers played a lead role in repealing alcohol prohibition, this protest will feature a 1930s car like the one used in the original anti-alcohol prohibition campaigns, but with anti-(drug) prohibition slogans and period costumes.

Where: Outside the UN, 44th St and 1st Ave, New York, NY 10017

When: Monday 18 April, 14:00 EST

Jane Slater, coordinator of Anyone’s Child: Families for Safer Drug Control, which has helped organize the event, said:

“The stories of the family members involved in the Anyone’s Child campaign reveal the tragic human costs of the global drug war. There is a hollow ring to the UNGASS slogan ‘A better tomorrow for today’s youth’ for the bereaved parents coming together at the UN. Their presence here demonstrates that punitive drug laws have brought untold grief to every corner of the globe. Just as US alcohol Prohibition was repealed because it caused far more harm than good, it is now time to end the War on Drugs.”

Gretchen Burns Bergman, lead organizer of Moms United to End the War on Drugs said:

“Mothers are taking a lead position in calling for health-oriented strategies and widespread global drug policy reform in order to stop the devastating loss of lives. The war on drugs has become a war waged against our own families. My sons are survivors of both incarceration and accidental overdose, but non-violent drug charges have a lifelong impact. We must end punitive prohibitionist policies for the sake of all of the children of the world.”

Donna May from Canada said:

“We are uniting with families all over the world.  We are here to tell our stories directly to our national leaders.  We call on them to demonstrate leadership and support an end to the global war that killed our loved ones.”

Anne-Marie Cockburn from the UK said:

“I am going to New York because I lost my only Child, Martha, aged 15, to an accidental ecstasy overdose. She wanted to get high, but she didn’t want to die. Our drug laws are not protecting our children, they’re destroying families like mine every day. We urgently need to end the drug war.”

Drugs are dangerous, but not as dangerous as the global drug war. This is a real war with real guns and real people being killed. We are pro-safety and we want to promote health, protect kids, reduce crime and save money.  The current system that criminalizes users delivers none of these and in fact puts ordinary people in huge danger. For the children we lost, there will be no tomorrow.  Our leaders need to show that they are serious about creating a better, safer world for young people and end the drug war now.

ENDS

Contacts

Jane Slater, Anyone’s Child, jane@tdpf.org.uk / 00 44 117 3250295

Gretchen Burns Bergman, Moms United to End the War on Drugs, gretanewpath@cox.net

Notes

‘Anyone’s Child: Families for Safer Drug Control’ is a network of families whose lives have been wrecked by international drug laws and are now campaigning to change them.

More information: https://anyoneschild.org/anyones-child-united-nations/

‘Moms United to End the War on Drugs’, a campaign of A New PATH (Parents for Addiction Treatment & Healing), is a movement to end the stigmatization and criminalization of people who use drugs or who are addicted to drugs. www.momsunited.net.

The group will also be holding a side event at the UNGASS 2016

When: Thursday 21st April, 1.00-2.00pm

Where: United Nations Building, Conference room B

What: How can the international drug control system provide a better tomorrow for the world’s youth?

Further information:

https://anyoneschild.org/anyones-child-united-nations/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEmfXIk_c2c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE4YyrQLORg

Spokespeople available for interview

Anne-Marie Cockburn, UK

Daughter Martha died of an ecstasy overdose.

“On 20th July, 2013, I received the phone call that no parent wants to get. The voice said that my 15-year-old daughter was gravely ill and they were trying to save her life. On that beautiful, sunny Saturday morning, Martha had swallowed half a gram of MDMA powder (more widely known as ecstasy) that turned out to be 91% pure. Within two hours of taking it, my daughter died of an accidental ecstasy overdose. She was my only child.”

Anne-Marie was blissfully ignorant about the world of drugs before Martha died, when she looked at her daughter’s internet history and found that she had been researching ways to take drugs safely. While no one wants drugs being sold to children, if Martha had got hold of legally regulated drugs meant for adults, labelled with health warnings and dosage instructions, she would not have gone on to take 5-10 times the safe dose.

“When I hear the news that a young person has died and yet another family has joined the bereaved parents’ club, I feel helpless as I wonder how many more need to die before someone in government will actually do something about it? As I stand by my child’s grave, what more evidence do I need that things must change? Isn’t this loss of precious lives an indicator of a law that is past its sell-by date and in need of urgent reform? A good start would be to conduct the very first proper review of our drug laws in over 40 years and to consider alternative approaches. But the people in power turn away from it. They play an amazing game of “Let’s pretend”. Well there’s no way for me to hide – every day I wake up, the stark reality of Martha’s absence hits me once again.”

To represent her beloved Martha, it is Anne-Marie’s quest to align herself with those who can help progress this conversation. That is why she’s involved with the Anyone’s Child project. This unique chorus of voices cannot be ignored; there is nowhere to hide from their harrowing stories.

Donna May, Canada
Daughter Jac died as a result of an opiate overdose.

Donna is a mother of three children, who almost learned too late about the real effect the practice of tough love has on addiction. Donna had found her daughter’s drug use difficult to understand or cope with, and had not been able to engage with her successfully. Their relationship had suffered as a result. Late one evening, she received a call informing her that her daughter Jac was going to lose her life from complications of her substance use. That call led to Donna May reconsidering her views and her actions around addiction.

“I realized too late. It wasn’t until she was dying that it became clear to me that her addiction was covering up an undiagnosed mental illness. Using illicit drugs had been the only relief she ever had from the constant confusion going on in her mind. The drugs were what she depended on in order to simply function on a day to day basis. But, what began as enough to feel relief, stopped being enough. The amount she needed grew and grew and grew; until they became bigger than she was.”

Before she died, Jac was able to speak to her mother and let her know her only wish: “Don’t let my life and the way I lived it be for nothing.”

As a result of this direct appeal, Donna is now dedicated to being an advocate for global drug policy reform to ensure no other substance user, or their loved ones, have to go through the hard taught lesson that she underwent herself.

Donna is the founder and facilitator of the campaigning site, Jac’s Voice, which focuses on living with addiction and mental illness, and works with mumsDU, a coalition of Canadian mothers who have lost sons and daughters to overdose and other drug related harms; the Canadian FED UP! Rally and Anyone’s Child International, campaigning to end the war on drugs.

Maricela Orozco, Mexico

Two sons kidnapped and disappeared by drug traffickers in Mexico’s drug war.

Maricela and her family are experiencing the nightmare that is the drug war in Mexico at first hand. In March 2014, Mariela’s 19-year-old son, Gerson Quevedo Orozco, who was studying architecture at university, was kidnapped while in a convenience store with a couple of friends in Veracruz. The first Maricela and her husband heard about it was when they received a call asking for 80,000 pesos in exchange for their son.

They paid the ransom and were waiting for their son to be returned, when a ‘supposed friend’ of their son stopped by and told them he knew where their son was. Maricela’s other son, Alan, and her daughter’s boyfriend, Miguel, went immediately to find him, but a van followed them and the people in it shot them dead. Alan and Miguel became part of the more than 100,000 deaths in Mexico since the drug war began.

Since this happened in their local neighbourhood, the family decided it would be unsafe to return home. They have been back only once – with police protection – to grab the clothes Alan would wear at his funeral and Maricela’s family are now victims of forced internal displacement. They are just one family out of more than 280,000 people displaced in Mexico and her son is just one of more than 20,000 missing  because of drug war violence, .  Maricela is still demanding for justice for her family and searching for her son. She knows personally how devastating the war on drugs has been for her family and her country, and is working tirelessly for a drug policy that respects human rights.

Peter Muyshondt, serving senior police officer from Belgium
Brother, Tom, died as a result of an opiate overdose.

“Being a police officer, I was supposed to obey and impose the law. Having and using drugs is still a felony, so being with my brother was always very confusing to me as it forced me to face the contradictions of drug policy. Should I be a policeman first (which you are assumed to be 24 hours a day) or should I be his brother?”

Peter definitely found himself avoiding some situations because of this confusion with his work and home role. For example, he didn’t dare go on holiday to Thailand with his brother because he was afraid they would be checked and searched in case he had drugs on him. He knew that Thailand had severe penalties for the possession of drugs and, as a policeman, Peter didn’t want to end up in a ‘career threatening’ situation.

“I was a coward then. The fact that I didn’t actively help my brother was mainly due to my position as a police officer. We could never be just normal brothers because I wanted to be the perfect cop and he was often a threat to my career. I think my family reacted similarly – they were also thinking of my career and would probably have reacted otherwise towards my brother if I hadn’t been a police officer. I wouldn’t act that way today. If Tom had not been labelled a criminal, he might still be here. If I had not been obliged to do my job with my hands tied, it might have worked out differently.”

Murtaza Majeed, Afghanistan
Grew up in war-torn Afghanistan, where he lost his cousin to an opiate overdose.
“My family was poor, like most Afghan families who lived in Kabul city during the civil war and under the Taliban regime. As a youngster, I had guns, and used bullets and burnt out tanks as toys. Schools were empty and us kids studied under fear of bullet fire and bombs.”

Murtaza has grown up in a period when drugs were widely available on the streets. He and his friends were first exposed to cannabis when they were 14. Most of them went on to use opium and heroin while they were in school. There was no information or education about drugs, with the only message being that drugs are bad and forbidden (“haram” in Islam). Yet around them, the young men witnessed many adults taking drugs openly, even some of their politicians and police officers.

“Every day, drug users face abuse and hatred in Afghanistan. Families shun their own children because of the stigma. I had a cousin who used heroin, but since we had no information about drugs, we forcefully urged him to quit, unaware that drug addiction is a complex phenomenon and not just about willpower. Of course, it didn’t work and one day we found him dead, covered in blood, with a needle in his groin.”

Murtaza has lost his closest friends to overdose or imprisonment because of the war on drugs – in some cases just for carrying a small amount of drugs. He believes that prohibition and the criminalisation of drug users have made drugs a force of evil, leading to stigmatisation and marginalisation. In Afghanistan, addiction is seen as shameful and a mother will often rather her child die than use drugs.

“My cousin and my closest friends have died because of wrong-headed drug policies. I carry the burden of their death, and it motivates me to stop the unjustifiable deaths of others who use drugs. Our generation is living in the midst of a drug war. We face physical and mental trauma everyday for conditions forced upon on us by a war which can never be won. Rather than keep fighting this war, we need to change tack. We need to put health and human rights – rather than punishment and stigmatisation – at the heart of our approach to drugs.”

Karen Garrison, USA
Two sons, Lawrence and Lamont, were imprisoned on mandatory minimum sentences of 15 and 19 years.

Identical twins Lawrence and Lamont Garrison were inseparable. In elementary school, one would rush to the other’s classroom and wait until he was dismissed. Living in the same house in Washington, D.C. that their mother and grandmother had grown up in, they attended Howard University together. Both worked part time to help pay their tuition and they graduated together in May 1998.

A month before their graduation, the police came to the door one night and arrested Lawrence and Lamont. They were charged with conspiracy as part of a 20-person powder and crack cocaine operation, implicated by the owner of a Maryland auto body shop.

“My boys never missed a day in school, they never stayed out all night and then one night the police knocked on the door and said they were drug dealers,” recalled the twins’ mother, Karen Garrison.

In court, they maintained their innocence and would not accept a plea bargain. Although no drugs, paraphernalia or drug money were found in their house or on their person, they were separately convicted of conspiracy to distribute powder and crack cocaine on the testimony of members of the conspiracy, and records showing calls they made to the body shop. According to Lawrence and Lamont, the phone calls related to a botched repair job on their uncle’s car. The owner of the body shop had his sentence reduced by implicating others to 36 months. Although neither brother had a prior conviction, they were sent to separate prisons hundreds of miles apart for Lamont to serve 19 years and Lawrence 15 years.

“After they were found guilty in June they never came back home,” their mother recalled. “I didn’t think stuff like this happens. If I had other children, how could I tell them ‘stay in school, be good and nothing bad will happen to you,’ because that’s not true.”

Ms Garrison has become an advocate for reform of drug policy and change to the sentencing laws – despite the fact that any alteration would not retroactively change the fate of her only twin sons. She said she aims to help the sons and daughters who have been victims of the law which has claimed many – whether innocent or guilty – as a result of the racial disparity and collateral consequences that arise from the unfair sentencing guidelines.

“I hope I can be halfway effective in helping,” said Ms Garrison. “It’s not getting better; it seems to be getting worse.”

Lugard Abila, Kenya
Friend died during a drugs raid, leaving behind her now orphaned seven year old daughter, Tina.

“My mother was a beautiful, caring and always supporting mother. Yes, she was hooked on heroin, but one thing I learned from her is that she was still my mother – and a very loving one. May her soul rest in peace.” Little Tina, who is just 7 years old, describes the loving relationship she had with her mother, who died as a result of the war on drugs.

We all know that drug use can cause great damage to individuals, their families and communities, but bad drug policies and policing causes greater damage to individuals. It leaves them isolated from society and suffering from the stigmatisation of being judged negatively by their community.

“Tina is just one among many children who have been orphaned by the war on drugs; their parents are locked up, mistreated, abused, beaten and – as in the case of Tina’s mother – even killed. She met her death as a result of how policies and policing affect people who use drugs in our country and around the world. We think of her as a silent hero. Tina’s mother was a friend and a sister to me. My personal connection and memories of her make me feel that if something could have been done to help her, she would be enjoying her gift of life right now just like anyone else.”

One day in March 2013 , the county askaris and the Kenyan police were told to raid a drug user site in the name of cleaning up the town. This was a place Njeri used to call her home and where she would find comfort. Terrified by the appearance of police officers, who threw tear gas in an attempt to secure the building, Njeri jumped from the second storey, fracturing her spine and two limbs, and losing her ability to walk. As a result of her injuries, she experienced excruciating prolonged pain and her efforts to get health care support were ineffectual due to the stigmatization of drug use. This is despite the fact that health providers take an oath to save lives while on duty. Tina died in February 2015, leaving behind a helpless daughter just seven years old.

“Are we paying too high a price in the name of protecting individuals, families and communities? We all come from diverse walks of life and I believe we are all here for some unique purpose, some noble objective that will allow us to manifest our higher human potential while we at the same time, adding value to the lives around us. This is why I believe in drug policy reform. We must treat people who use drugs as individual human beings with respect for human rights and their health if we are to really protect our families.”

Javier Sicilia, Mexico
Sicilia’s son, 24 year old Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega, was murdered along with six other victims.

Juan Francisco was a 24 year old in the final year of a business studies course when he was killed by violent drug gang members.

“There was a row at a nightclub in Temixco, Morelos – Juan wasn’t even there at first, but then a friend of his called him and he went to see what was going on,” says Javier. “No one really knows what happened next but by the end of it, Juan and six other young people were dead.”

This, says Javier, is what drugs have done to his country. “The violence is now so widespread that an everyday event – like a row in a nightclub – can escalate within minutes into mass murder. It’s a country out of control; people are dying everywhere the whole time … and many are young, like Juan, at the threshold of their lives.”

Mexico has borne the brunt of the war on drugs and is at the forefront of pushing for reform to global drug policy. So many people have died and there seems to be no end in sight to this completely unnecessary situation. The insecurity and violence in Mexico cannot be allowed to continue and the answer is not more guns, police and prohibition – we all know that hasn’t worked.

Grace, The Philippines
Brother was murdered because drugs are left in the hands of criminals.

“People called my brother names and I did too. I grew up knowing and seeing that drug use is bad and is something to be ashamed of. Still I felt how those labels made him feel, how the way people looked and treated him wounded him. He was the most caring and loving sibling and from him I learned how to live simply, because he withstood whatever came his way.”

Their mother tried to remove her son from temptation, sending him to places where she thought drugs were not accessible. He was a generous and kind young man who would do whatever his friends would ask of him – his mother thought he was too gullible. The wider family also looked down on him, including the boy’s uncle, a police officer. His nephew would try to kiss his uncle’s hand to show respect, but his uncle poured scorn on him, leaving him feeling crushed and unloved.

“We grieved for the death of my brother’s dreams, for the death of hope in him. His dignity died and a part of me died too. I was that little sister who saw her brother’s agony, who only wanted to see him happy and safe, whether he was using or not. I loved him for all that he was.”

Grace’s brother was only thrown into jail when his own parents had him arrested for his drug use and in 1999, he was murdered. She has been told it was due to a drug deal he messed up and the family did not seek justice for him in an environment where he would receive no sympathy or even fair, humane treatment.

It is this ostracisation that Grace feels so strongly: “Death is not just physical. We die in many ways and we kill without intending to. Addiction kills when we make drug users feel unworthy, helpless and hopeless; when we treat them with animosity, stigma and prejudice. The war on drugs creates greater wars inside the people who mostly need care and support.”