When two young adults died after taking ecstasy at the Mutiny music festival last month, Ray Lakeman understood the bereaved parents' nightmare better than most. In 2014, his two sons had been exactly the same age - 18 and 20 - when they travelled together to Manchester for a football match. The younger boy, a physics and astronomy undergraduate, had bought ecstasy on the dark web, which he and his brother took after the game. Police officers knocked on the Lakemans' door two days later, to tell them their boys had been found dead in their hotel room.
"So I understand," he says softly, "what those parents are going through. I can understand they'll be absolutely furious." The public appeal by one bereaved mother ("If nothing else I hope what happened to her will deter you from taking anything ever") was anguished but familiar, conforming to the convention of an ecstasy-tragedy narrative established by Leah Betts's parents more than 20 years ago. "And I can understand them being confused and upset, and in terrible, terrible pain, and saying, 'This has got to stop,'" Lakeman goes on gently. "But you're not going to stop it by telling your kids not to do it. If that was possible, my boys would be alive now - and so would dozens and dozens and dozens of other people."
Even Lakeman's sons' friends have told him it won't stop them taking ecstasy. The dealer who sold the drug to his sons was sentenced to 16 years in December - in Portsmouth, just miles from the site of the Mutiny festival. "And that didn't put other dealers in the city off, did it? So I find it quite strange when people who've lost loved ones say, we've got to ban it. Because banning it didn't stop their loved one taking it. It didn't save their family."
Lakeman's alternative strategy will sound wrong to many. But growing numbers of other parents have seen campaigns such as Just Say No fail to save their child, and want a new drug policy that works. For Lakeman, the solution is obvious. Instead of banning drugs, we should legalise them all.
I meet him at the family home on the Isle of Man, where his sons Jacques and Torin grew up. Photographs of smiling, windswept boys line the shelves. To the north, the island is buzzing with motorbikes (the TT race season is underway), but from the living-room window we gaze out across peaceful grasslands to the Irish Sea. Lakeman tells me the island community is close-knit, but the yawning skies and rolling hills evoke a sense of wide-open spaces and tranquillity that feels as if it belongs in a much earlier decade. "If I wanted to," he corrects me, "I could make a phone call and get any drug delivered to us within half an hour."
