Heroin killed two of my boys but I still think it should be made legal'

Many believe the government’s ­policy of ­making it illegal to produce, sell or possess the drug has failed.
Rose Humphries, 70, a retired school governor from Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, lost two of her three sons to heroin overdoses – yet ­amazingly she’s fighting for the drug to be legalised. see why after the cut.



She says it’s hard to put the anxiety, shame and ­grief of watching her sons perish into words.
“I still struggle to understand how the family I once thought to be perfect has ended up broken by something so far from all that we knew before,” she said.

And she warned: “It took two deaths, two funerals, two broken hearts for us to realise that no amount of respectability or love can protect your children from a drug so ­powerful it will strip them of everything – even their lives.”
You might think that she and husband Jeremy would be calling for tougher rules on illegal drugs – but the opposite is true.

 If heroin had been legally regulated she said, one of her sons could have gone into a clinic when he’d relapsed and been given a safe dose, along with access to counselling.
“Instead a young dad was forced on to the streets to buy it illegally from dealers who don’t care who they sell to or what’s in the drugs they sell.”

Now she wants a more compassionate system for dealing with drug addicts.
“People see heroin addicts as scum but the struggle they face and the physical symptoms are as harrowing as any other ­serious illness,” she said. “And the grief when they go is just as unbearable for their loved ones.”

The terrible tragedy prompted her to join Anyone’s Child, a network of families whose lives have been wrecked by UK drug laws and who campaign to allow ­controlled legalisation.