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Rachel killed Rachel, because Rachel chose heroin, and carried on choosing it. Rachel is dead because she made terrible choices in her life. Her final choice was to inject herself with so much heroin that her body would stop functioning An overdose like that is not murder by heroin It is surrender. It is suicide.The picture, and the story that ran inside the paper, though tell us nothing of Rachel’s decline to this state.

Instead they tell a familiar story of a happy girl, who met fatefully with a junkie suitor, who corrupted her unto death.Rachel may have been an innocent, but we do not have to travel far up the chain of her acquaintance to find an old-fashioned embodiment of evil. For legal reasons as well as schematic ones, we know nothing of this man, except that Rachel broke with him and with heroin, but returned to him and to heroin, then died.In the story he is living heroin, deadly, addictive and evil. In real life, he may just be a poor sod as unable to cope as Rachel was. “Act now to save victims like Rachel,” The Mirror’s campaigning leader says (although it doesn’t prescribe what action it has in mind).The Mirror is right to call for changes in the drug laws. But it is wrong to stick to the same old moral equivalencies in its attempts to persuade. Act now to save Rachel’s ex-boyfriend, who doesn’t appear to be dead and is therefore in the market for saving.The story being told is a simple one, and like all simple stories, it has a moral.

The moral is that this could happen to anyone, and the photograph is part of a video compiled to warn schoolchildren that this could happen to them too.An education spokesman for Hertfordshire, where Rachel grew up, emphasises this. “If you were trying to put together an ideal background for a young person to grow up in, the Holcroft family would be it,” Mike Denton declares. “Yet even in that environment it was possible for this tragedy to happen.”I notice that the family that was so secure for Rachel does not share her name Rachel’s father is not in the story. The Mirror doesn’t tell us whether he was dead or alive, in Rachel’s life or out of it He is an irrelevance.This might mean nothing. There is no one left who can say what impact this absent father had on Rachel. But since there is strong evidence that the tendency towards addictive behaviour may be hereditary, there is every chance that even if Rachel herself was unaware of any absence in her life, he wasn’t so far out of this picture at all.I’m not trying to say that Rachel’s mother Pauline wasn’t a great mother, or her stepfather Mick not a great stepfather, or that any non-traditional family unit is imperfect People from happy families do become heroin addicts. But they are in the minority.What I am saying is that Rachel is not a cypher She did not die as a warning to us all There have been plenty of warnings about heroin People don’t use heroin because they don’t know the danger.

They use it becauseits danger is part of the attraction.The idea of Rachel’s story as a universal fable is fake. Her body has been displayed in the hope that its sight will inspire different choices in others Maybe it will. But that doesn’t make it a positive act.How can it be right that a society as wealthy as ours is in need of pictures of dead or dying girls to prick its conscience? For Leah Betts and Lorna Spinks were pictured in The Mirror too These sacrificial meta-virgins may deserve our mourning. But the people who need support in their addiction are not always so pretty, or so easy to get sentimental about.