Northern Ireland, Take Drugs Seriously: We need to spread the message

This guest blog was written by Penny McCanny, mother of Aidan and Anyone’s Child Campaigner. Penny will be speaking at our next webinar, Northern Ireland: Take Drugs Seriously on Thursday 1st April 19:00 BST. Register here.

We talk frequently of life changing moments; sometimes about events that are really not all that life altering, more like bends on a road. My life changed irrevocably on the day Aidan was born and again on the day he died. I fell in love on the day he was born and 25 years later I didn’t know that it was possible to be in such physical pain and yet still to be breathing. Love and grief, both physically overwhelming.

In the last few months of Aidan’s life as he moved towards a life without heroin, we had our first real conversations about drugs and, I am talking too about alcohol. We talked about prohibition and the damage it caused. Prohibition to me meant alcohol and the early decades of the 20th century when it was an illegal drug. I learned a lot of other things too, that that bag of heroin can be of any strength, that moralising was hypocritical, and that secrecy is born out of a fear of judgement.

Aidan was moving to the other side of his damaging relationship with heroin, but there would be lapses, we knew that, and on the 27th of July 2013 he took heroin and he died.

Of course, I know that if Aidan had not taken heroin he would not have died from an overdose of heroin. But imagine that the next time you take a gin and tonic, it was 100% alcohol. No-one would stand at your grave and say, “self-inflicted”, they would say that the bottle should have been labelled correctly.

If I could speak to him now, I would say that I understand that regulation saves lives, that heroin assisted treatment saves lives and that safe injection facilities save lives. If someone’s child takes an illegal drug, I want them to survive, I want those children to know that their lives are valuable to us, that they are loved in the same way that I love Aidan.

Anyone’s Child is the human face of the impact of the War on Drugs, their message is the same as Aidan’s. Since 2013 I speak about Aidan with pride, and so many people that I talk to say that they have also taken illegal drugs or have a problematic use of alcohol. Almost to a person they hear Aidan’s story and when we talk about what would have saved his life, they say “that makes sense.”

In Northern Ireland we need to spread the message that what we are doing now does not work; we need an evidence-based approach to the management of drugs, one that saves lives. We need honest dialogue, privately and publicly. We want to set up Anyone’s Child in Northern Ireland so that we can talk about our local challenges, perhaps help people to see that they do not need to be afraid of speaking out, that taking the control of drugs away from our criminal gangs will give us safer communities. I hope that people who use illegal drugs, and their families, will see that they are not alone and that many people want to help rather than judge.

Read Penny’s story here.