2nd video

• A student is critically ill on a life support machine after taking the drug ecstasy at her 18th birthday party
• Leah bets collapsed after taking a tablet which police believe may have been contaminated
• Four young people are helping the police with their inquiries
• Leah's father, a former policeman, and her mother, a nurse whose job partly involves warning young people about drugs, spoke at a news conference this morning: 'I've got love for my daughter, I've got anger for the people with the drugs and I hate this bastard that's applyed them and the messages to the children just don't take the things you're you're young lovely looking kids you don't need that sort of thing to have a good time you can have a good time without someone else making money out of you'
• From day one the Leah Bets story looked as if it was going to be a classic moral panic
• There had been other deaths associated with taking ecstasy that had been reported in the front page of newspapers
• What made the Leah Bets story appealing to the media

  • The availability of the photographs and the image of her which makes it appealing to the media because it's not an abstract person, it's a very dramatic very immediate photograph of her on her deathbed
  • Leah was young, white and pretty, which the media finds particularly attractive in victims
• Leah collapsed at her home in the village of Latchington after taking one ecstasy tablet during her 18th birthday party
• Leah's parents had stayed in especially to watch out for drink and drugs at the party
• Leah was studying for her A-levels at Bastion College, and her friends in her year, many of whom attended her party, were still in deep shock
• In Latchington, where the Bets family live, villagers were also grieving today
• Drug-related deaths are taking place in areas that you wouldn't normally expect them to be
• Within a day it became clear that the ecstasy tablet was pure, and that Leah had taken ecstasy tablets before, and had died not as a result of a poison tablet but as a result of a combination of taking the tablet and drinking too much water
• At the trial of the person accused of supplying the drug, it became clear that there was no "Mr Big" or evil drug pusher, but that a young friend of Leah's had supplied the tablet to her as a birthday present
• The Leah Bets case forced British society to fear some uncomfortable realities, and it would no longer be possible to simplify the cause of drug taking or to draw hard and fast boundaries between the deviant and the normal
• One 1991 estimate put the amount of ecstasy tablets consumed a week as half a million
• Huge shifts in perception were taking place around this topic, and only 5 months after the death of their daughter, the Bets had clearly changed their position on what could and what should be done about drug taking in this country
• The majority of young people experiment in some way with illegal drugs or a misuse of prescription drugs, and the majority of young people in this country drink before they're legally allowed to drink, and that is the norm