‘My sister died after taking a line of cocaine’

Stacey Jordan still wonders whether she could have done more to save her sister.
Lucy White was just 24 when she died in hospital in summer 2018 after a line of cocaine triggered a heart attack and then a coma.
Lucy, a student from Bristol, had been introduced to cocaine by her mother, a long-term drug user – but Stacey had managed to get Lucy clean, before she relapsed, a few months before her death.
When Stacey got to the hospital she found her sister, almost unrecognisable.
“I should have been more strict,” she says 18-months on. “You look back now and you’re like, ‘She was hiding from me. She was avoiding me for a reason.’
“But could I see it? Maybe not. Did I want to see it? That’s maybe the question.”
Figures compiled for BBC News by NHS Digital show Lucy’s story is far from unusual, with record levels of cocaine use putting increasing pressure on the NHS in England.

 

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