The end of exams marks the start of teenage tragedies
Summer term, if not summertime, is upon us. As teenagers the length of the land knuckle down to GCSES and A-levels and undergraduates plough through their exams, their single collective consolation is that soon it will be over.
Soon, the long sunny evenings, late nights and heady delights of the festival circuit will be theirs to enjoy – with their parents’ blessing. Why shouldn’t they kick back, chill out and revel in their new found freedom?
“Wind-down season” was what the father of 17-year-old Londoner Emily Lyon called it. “A final fling” to celebrate the end of her finals was the expression used by the investigating officer in the case of Sheffield maths student Joana Burns, 22.
Both girls are dead. Lives full of promise cut tragically short by a £7 tablet of MDMA (or ecstasy). Pills that kill are on the rise, and parents like me can only hope and pray our children won’t put themselves at risk.
This week a pathologist at the inquest into Joana’s death, which occurred in June last year, warned there was “no such thing as a safe drug, particularly with this kind of psychoactive substance”.
“If you are susceptible, they will kill you,” said Dr Kim Suvarna, consultant histopathologist at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. “The young tend to believe they can do things they wish because they are young and immortal. Unfortunately, that doesn’t apply.”
My daughter is 15 and currently sitting her GCSES. Her summer itinerary involves trips with friends, music events and a weekend at Reading Festival, which has become something of a rite of passage for her age group – not least because it kicks off the day after the exam results are released.
By then, she and her friends will all be 16, in a tent in a field with thousands of other young people, who will be drinking, smoking cannabis and taking recreational drugs. What could possibly go wrong? Apart from everything, that is?
I’ve never taken ecstasy, which possibly makes me an exception rather than the rule for someone ostensibly partying in the Nineties. I certainly know lots of people who enjoyed it back then.
I don’t personally know of anyone who died, but who of my generation can forget the name Leah Betts? It is seared into my retina along with the Polaroid photograph of her in hospital, dying. That was in 1995. Essex-born Leah took an ecstasy tablet on her 18th birthday and died after drinking seven litres of water in just 90 minutes – extreme thirst being a side-effect.
Her parents courageously released the snap to the press. Its impact was huge, shocking, heartbreaking.
Yet 23 years later, the roll call of victims grows ever longer. Travel and tourism student Steph Shevlin, 22, from Crosby, died at a music event in June 2016. The month before that, 17-yearold Faye Allen suffered a fatal reaction at her first ever rave.
Her boyfriend has been jailed alongside the dealer who sold him the drugs, which had been smuggled into the event despite security checks and sniffer dogs.
In 2016, the iconic London nightclub Fabric had its licence revoked after two drug-related deaths. One was 18-yearold student Ryan Browne in June; six weeks later Jack Crossley, also 18, suffered the same fate.
At the inquest into his death, Ryan was described as a “naive user” because he first took one tablet, and when he failed to feel anything, took a second.
He started hallucinating, twitching and his temperature soared until he went into cardiac arrest and died. Horrible, terrifying, needless.
The truth is that every teenager who takes the so-called happy drug MDMA is a “naive user” because it’s like a game of Russian roulette in which some individuals, who are genetically predisposed to metabolise MDMA less well than others, will react very badly.
According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics, deaths linked to ecstasy or MDMA are at their highest level in a decade. In 2010, there were eight; in 2015, the count was 57.
Moreover the drug, sold in powder form as well as in pills, is purer than ever. New, cheaper methods of production mean that manufacturers, many of them based in the Netherlands, have no qualms about making ecstasy stronger than ever, with some competing to produce the most potent product: pills can contain triple the typical dose found in the Nineties.
And before you insist that your offspring are pure as the driven proverbial, let’s ponder an NHS survey in November last year that found 11- to 15-year-olds in England were more likely to have tried drugs than cigarettes.
Apparently 24per cent have tried recreational drugs at least once in their lives, a nine per cent increase from the last survey in 2014, and a figure that rises to 37per cent among 15-year-olds. The equivalent statistic for cigarettes is 19per cent.
If that’s not scary enough to have you leaping up the stairs two at a time to lock the bedroom wind… oh, too late, the net curtains are flapping in the breeze along with rope made of sheets.
Whether we like it or not, lockdown is not an option here in 2018. Our only real defence is education, instilling into our kids that MDMA is not harmless, impressing upon them that illegal highs are illegal for a reason and keeping the lines of communication open.
Our demob-happy young people will feel elated, reckless and ready to take on the world as they stream joyfully out of exam halls. But for some, like Leah Betts and Joana Burns, the flip side of ecstasy was nothing but agony.