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Yvonne Roberts argues that photographs of dead drug misusers have little effect on young people.

It is surely one of the saddest uses to which a family album can be put - creating a public obituary from snapshots that capture a happy childhood, a successful academic life and then a premature and sordid drug-related death. The image of Rachel Whitear, bent double, a syringe in hand, was published last week with the permission of her mother Pauline Holcroft and Rachel's stepfather Mick.

The photographs are part of a video intended to deter young people from taking drugs. In 1995, the parents of Leah Betts, who died after taking ecstacy, published a photograph of her in intensive care. Her father, Paul, has since given talks in more than 3,000 schools. Yet, statistics suggest that ecstasy users rose from 9 per cent of 16 to 29-year-olds in 1996 to 12 per cent in 2000. Paul Betts says: "If you save one person's life, it's been worthwhile."

Parents may have been appalled by the image of Rachel's final moments but the impact on many of the young has inevitably been more muted. Partly because they have been reared in a culture of heroin chic where such images are the norm in youth magazines. Second, because many young people are either regular "soft" drug users themselves or know others who are - so they know from first hand experience that very few die young.

In the spring, the House of Commons home affairs select committee is expected to recommend that the government establish clinics to provide free heroin and methadone to addicts in controlled circumstances. The government should go further and decriminalise all drugs since the "war" has already been lost. Drugs are cheaper than ever and their use is growing. In 1970, 15 per cent of people had used an illegal drug, by 1995 this had risen to 45 per cent. In 1993, deaths from morphine-based drugs stood at 187; in 2000, the figure had reached 926.

Young people should be given the (sometimes disputed) facts about heroin, ecstasy and cannabis, just as they are now on alcohol and tobacco on the basis that some will make an informed decision while others will take the risk of addiction and for a variety of reasons.

What kills and harms is the existence of a black market and the adulteration of heroin; the unhygienic use of needles and the lifestyle that goes with depending on the illegal. Experiments in which addicts are officially given heroin see a reduction in crime and drug-related deaths. What is truly shocking is the failure to acknowledge that and act appropriately not from a moral or medical standpoint but because of the politicians' fear of losing votes.