Hilary at the Anyone’s Child lobby of Parliament 2022

It’s been 4 years since my son Ben died from a heroin overdose. I would like to say the grief has lessened and I have come to some kind of peace and acceptance, but the truth is I haven’t found any peace. The only acceptance I’ve experienced is coming to terms with the fact that I will always have this ball of pain and sadness within me. It’s like having a limb severed, you find ways to adapt to live with it, and find new ways to cope, but your life is never the same you will always have scars and this reminder of what life used to be. I’m a totally different person and I’ve had to get to know this new me, as has everyone that knows and loves me. It’s one of the loneliest most desolate journeys, one without a destination, and the only way through is to remember my love for Ben is something that no one can take away, for love endures even in the bleakest of times and I cling onto the hope that I will make it and live a life that will honour my son’s memory.  The grief is exhausting and full of every emotion you can think of, and the way Ben died has made it so much more complicated, and stigmatised, and when I looked at figures of the destruction and death caused by drugs use and saw it was rising every year, and my son being one of those statistics, I decided to look into it a bit more and have been a campaigner ever since.

As with anyone who has lost a loved one particularly before their time, you look for answers, you want their lives to mean something. Ben was an addict and died from an overdose. I remember in the early days thinking people were judging. Did they think he deserved it? Or think it was his fault? Because of the stigma and people’s conception of addiction and the many opinions people have, you can feel very isolated and shamed. But I’ve been determined not to let how he died overshadow the fact he was also a kind, caring, loving person; a friend, a son, a brother, an uncle, and he also had dreams for the future like anyone else. But sadly, his addiction hindered all of this, and the more I researched the more I realised so did the laws and attitudes. Maybe things could’ve been so much better for Ben.

I suppose like everyone else I read the news, saw all the drug busts, and thought what an amazing job the police are doing keeping our streets safe. But the more I read, the more I realised actually making something illegal doesn’t always mean safer. In fact, I found out that the current legislation and policies are over 50 years old and have remained largely unchanged. We are losing the drug war, and stats and figures prove this; deaths, criminal convictions, harm, cost to society and our health system have risen every year. It is fast becoming a health crisis and needs addressing urgently if we want a safer world for our children.

Is it time for change? Well, I think the answer is obvious, for every drug gang that is “busted” another is created sometimes within hours. The violence becomes more brutal, cleverer, and our children are now being targeted. There is simply too much money involved, you will never get rid of them. The only way forward is to bring it out of criminal hands, and have another safer way of obtaining drugs, alongside decent education, decent harm reduction – a more health based and compassionate approach.

Keeping drugs illegal and criminalising those that take them is just exasperating the problem. If we regulated and maybe looked at why people take drugs, supported them, and regulated; if there were drug overdose prevention centres and consumption rooms taking it off the streets so we could engage with people who use drugs; if we had drugs testing, I’m convinced deaths and harm would decrease as would crime. None of these things are even pioneering, they have been implemented in other countries and proven to have success. Policies should be evidence based but still we carry on with the same answers: more police, more arrests, more prisons, ‘getting tough’. Why do we think we will get a different result?

You will not ever eliminate drugs – they are here to stay. But most of the harm caused is by the criminality surrounding them, you don’t know what’s in the drugs, and the people making money will not care about the harm caused because they want you to buy again so will go to many lengths to keep you hooked. We need a different approach; we need to help keep the world safer. Our criminal justice system is overloaded, and drug laws are at the root cause of much of this. By criminalising we set a lot of young people up for a life of crime unable to get out of these cycles. By reducing the illegal demand, you will severely dent the profits and hit the criminals harder than any police raids or arrests.

My son died in a toilet. He was 27 and full of hope, potential, and he had so much to give to society. If only he could’ve been in a safer place, had somewhere to go that cared about him that could offer him support instead of judgement, maybe things could’ve turned out differently. I will never know. But what I do know, and most people would agree, is that we need to start reducing the harm and the casualties of this drug war. We need to start listening, talking, and learning. We can’t stay on this hamster wheel going round and round and getting nowhere. We need to get off and think about what we are really doing, for all the Bens in the world, and the many families suffering with the hell of addiction.

You can read more about Hilary’s story here.