“It’s been ten years since my daughter died,” says Anne-Marie Cockburn, a softly spoken woman wearing a T-shirt reading, ‘My daughter’. “It feels very distorted to say that number. But it has been ten years since I last held my child’s hand.”
Cockburn’s daughter, Martha, died at the age of 15 after taking MDMA. Today, her bereaved mother is part of Anyone’s Child, a network of families impacted by drug-related deaths.
When I meet Cockburn, she is standing outside Parliament alongside 150 others, many of whom are wearing similar T-shirts: ‘My son’, ‘My nephew’, ‘My friend’. All are united not only by the pain of losing a loved one, but in their belief that the UK’s drug laws were to blame for their deaths.
