Rachel's drugs legacy

We've all seen the pictures: a young woman's body slumped awkwardly on bended knees; the colour of her arms a livid, shocking purple. In her right hand a syringe, the cap neatly replaced just seconds, presumably, before she died. But 21-year-old Rachel Whitear does not conform to stereotype. Her flat in Exmouth is clean and tidy - the police later report - not a squat or a slum. She looked after herself well; she didn't steal to pay for her heroin habit; she still took pride in her appearance.

She wasn't the kind of girl to whom this was supposed to happen.

Talking for the first time since the Government this week moved a step further towards liberalising the drug laws, her stepfather Mick Holcroft says: "Since we released those pictures, we've had lots of parents approach us for advice. Parents of nice, bright, middle-class kids that you wouldn't believe had a problem. I honestly think it can happen to anyone."

With that in mind, Education Secretary Estelle Morris this week announced that a copy of the Holcrofts' 20-minute anti-drugs video, Rachel's Story - describing their daughter's harrowing decline from bright schoolgirl to teenage addict - will be made available to every secondary school in the country. "If we can save just one child, then we'll have succeeded," says Mick.

Yet this was also the week that a former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham, called for the legalisation of cannabis, while a House of Commons Select Committee recommended the downgrading of Ecstasy from class A to B.

Whatever you think about the cannabis issue, Britain's attitude towards drugs and the law has never been more confused - while families like the Holcrofts try desperately to come to terms with the devastation caused by teenage drift from experimentation to hardcore use.

Rachel took cannabis and probably ecstasy, too. Pauline and Mick discovered this only after her death, by reading her diaries.

"They call cannabis a gateway drug," says Mick. "And it is. But only because you enter a kind of drugs culture when you take it. You're among people who take other, harder drugs, and you meet dealers who've got cannabis in one pocket and heroin in another."

Does he therefore think it should be legalised, and power removed from the dealers?

"We went to Amsterdam to see the cafes," he says, "but I'm not sure I can see that working here. I think we'd be willing to contemplate legalisation if it could somehow be strictly regulated. But the legal situation is irrelevant, really. Kids aren't prevented from taking drugs because it's against the law. They won't take drugs if they're frightened of them, if they're told and shown how they can destroy lives."

Pauline and Mick Holcroft are friendly, open people, clearly supportive of each other yet still, three years on, bewildered by the manner of their daughter's death. One of the hardest parts, says Pauline, is discovering how much she didn't know about her child. It's likely that Rachel started experimenting with drugs at 16.

"She was a bit of a rebel, but not enough to worry," says Pauline. "She hated dressing up, and only ever wore trousers or long skirts. But she passed 10 GCSEs, so whatever she was doing wasn't affecting her work."

It was when Rachel met and started dating a boy five years her senior, Luke Fitzgerald, that vague alarm bells started to sound.

"She was very possessive of him," says Pauline, "and she stopped seeing all her old girlfriends. I think the other girls knew that Luke was a heroin addict."

But the Holcrofts didn't. "He seemed perfectly pleasant to us," says Mick. "Perhaps it's the naivety of our generation but we didn't spot any warning signs. He was never 'out of it' with us and he worshipped Rachel. I think they were probably, genuinely, in love."

There were hints and clues at this time but nothing concrete. Once, Luke's father rang Mick and asked whether the Holcrofts were "happy about" the budding relationship between Rachel and his son. Mick says: "I thought he meant happy about the age difference but, looking back, he must have meant: are you OK with the drugs problem?"

Slowly, Rachel began to fall in with Luke's friends and into drugs - cannabis and ecstasy at first, then heroin. The Holcrofts lived in the market town of Ledbury in Herefordshire, and there wasn't much for teenagers to do except hang out, and go to the pub. "They were bored, yes, but Rachel and Luke seemed to be wrapped up in each other more than other teenage couples."

Pauline and Mick began to notice changes in Rachel's personality and behaviour. "She just wasn't so happy," says Mick. "Simple as that. She'd be very defensive about where she was going, or what she was doing and withdrawn too. Her weight started to fluctuate."

When Rachel announced that she'd decided not to go to university, having applied and been accepted by five, there was a big row and hurtful things were said in the heat of the moment. But the Holcrofts remained supportive, and Rachel continued to live at home, getting a job in a local wine merchants. All the time, however, Luke was drifting into greater dependency and Rachel was beginning to slide.

Eventually, she confided in a family friend, admitting her heroin use and, in effect, asking for help.

The friend told Pauline and Mick. "We were in shock for a while," says Pauline, shaking her head even now as she remembers. "We didn't talk to her about it for a couple of days because we were so confused. And it was so difficult confronting her. We tried over and over but she'd just leave the house. Later, occasionally, she'd start to talk about it herself and those were the precious conversations when we could try to persuade her to get help."

Counsellors were rung up, and doctors informed. The Holcrofts tried desperately to admit Rachel to various drug programmes, and eventually succeeded. She cleaned up for months at a time, once renting a pretty cottage in the countryside to get away from the local drugs scene. But always, she'd slip back - for reasons her parents still don't fully understand.

"I don't know how much she lied to us," says Pauline, "but I do know that heroin addicts are very good at deceiving people. She always swore she wasn't injecting. She said that she had to leave a room if people started to inject because it was such a horrible practice. But, later, we found out that she'd started to inject, and that just filled me with horror."

The only constant in her addiction was Luke Fitzgerald: with each attempt to clean herself up, she'd break up with Luke, only to admit him and heroin back into her life.

Understandably, the Holcrofts haven't been able to talk to Luke since Rachel's death. "I just couldn't see him," says Pauline. "I'm not sure there's anything to say." It was only later that the Holcrofts, both in their fifties, discovered that Luke had a string of convictions for theft.

While Rachel worked to fund her habit, her boyfriend would shoplift.

She never quite hit rock bottom, however, not until that last day of her life. The year before she died, she finally seemed to have kicked the heroin and changed her mind about university. A place was offered at Bath, and she took it. The Holcrofts were at first elated, and then horrified - Luke was going with her. "I'd hate to see her attendance record," says Pauline. "It was never going to work with him there too."

"We went to see her in Bath, in the pub she worked at to subsidise her grant," says Mick. "And she looked fantastic that day, like a million dollars. She was slim and beautiful and the landlord loved her. But, looking back on it - well, she was on heroin then. That's why she was so thin. I can remember telling her how wonderful she looked, and all the time it was the drugs."

It's the kind of memory that haunts him still. "She was an adult, she was living her own life. It's very hard not to feel guilt, but we ran the risk of alienating her if we pressed too hard."

Inevitably, Rachel dropped out just months into her course, and she and Luke moved to Exmouth in Devon. When she died, say her parents, killed by that last injection of lethally pure heroin, she was back on an upward curve. In the last months of her life, she'd begun to write letters to Pauline - long, emotional letters in which she said sorry for what she'd done, and what she'd become. "She was ashamed. She felt guilty and embarrassed, to have put us through what she had. But we thought she was starting to take control again."

And she was. Shortly before that overdose, Rachel arranged to meet Pauline and Mick in Exmouth, in the town square, and then perhaps come home with them to Herefordshire, to get away from the now destructive relationship with Luke Fitzgerald. But she didn't turn up at the appointed time, nine in the morning. As Pauline and Mick waited in the square, patient at first and then a little angry, the police were in Rachel's flat - not far away - and her body was being removed. She'd been dead for three days.

Later that same day, Pauline's own mother - Rachel's grandma - saw a newsflash on local TV. A young woman's body had been found in a flat in Exmouth. She rang Pauline: "I can remember her very words: 'I don't know how to tell you this, and I don't want to upset you, but...' I knew instantly it was Rachel."

Making the video has been a distraction from grief for the Holcrofts; a way to give her life, and death, some meaning. "The stigma of drug-taking has somehow disappeared over the years," says Mick. "And kids aren't as scared of drugs as they used to be." It's the Holcrofts' hope that Rachel's traumatic end, her tragedy, will prove the saving of someone else.