Talking about drugs with your children – how, where, when and why it matters

"On Friday 17 January 2014 my funny, chatty, kind, popular and big-hearted sixteen-year-old son, Dan, went off to a party. He didn’t come home."

On Friday 17 January 2014 my funny, chatty, kind, popular and big-hearted sixteen-year-old son, Dan, went off to a party. He didn’t come home.

The policeman who knocked in the early hours told us he’d been found collapsed at a rave on the other side of London, after taking ecstasy. We spent the next two days in intensive care, watching him die from multiple organ failure.

When this happened, we realised a lot of things. We realised drugs were much closer to our door than we’d thought, and are part of young people’s social environments, especially by their mid to late teens.

We realised if someone like Dan could end up in this worst of all worst-case scenarios, then that risk was there for any young person, along with all the possible shades of harm and damage drugs and alcohol can cause.

We realised other parents were probably, like us, not as aware as they needed to be about this very different landscape their children inhabit, and perhaps not as well equipped as they could be to help their children keep themselves safe. And we realised we needed to do something about it, so we set up a drugs education charity in Dan’s name.

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