ELIZABETH BURTON-PHILLIPS

Elizabeth Burton-Philips has just retired from a 39 year teaching career.
For the last seventeen years she has been Head of Department at one
of the most successful girls’ schools in the country. She and her husband Tony live in Berkshire.

As both mother and grandmother Elizabeth can’t resist showing off pictures of her two beautiful little
grandchildren sitting with their adoring father Simon. But for Elizabeth, the joy runs even more deeply
than most, contrasting as it does with the devastation her family experienced seven years ago.

At the age of 13, her son Simon and his twin brother Nick began experimenting by smoking cigarettes
and cannabis which led them to try increasingly dangerous drugs over a period of 14 years, culminating
in injecting heroin. Full of naivety and thinking doing drugs was all a bit of a laugh, the drug dealers saw
their chance to groom Nick and Simon onto addictive hard drugs, by offering them their first heroin ‘spliff’ for free.
This was a step towards learning to die. One February day in 2004, after a huge, drug-fuelled argument,
Simon went to make peace with his brother and found that Nick had hanged himself in despair because of his addiction.

Elizabeth published the story of how addiction affected her family in ‘Mum, can you lend me twenty quid? – What drugs did to my family‘. The response since May 2007 has been staggering, with over 20.000 telephone calls to her and emails from families saying “your story is our story, it mirrors everything in our own lives and we too are waiting in dread for that knock on the door that you had one night from the police’’.

Elizabeth cares passionately about the family and friends of an addict, the forgotten victims of addiction and particularly those who are bereaved by addiction. Her son Nick’s tragic death gave Simon his life back and her family the opportunity to speak publicly about something they had hidden for such a long time. With the support of patrons and trustees Elizabeth founded The Nicholas Mills Foundation in 2006 and it now trades as the registered charity DrugFAM. www.drugfam.co.uk

Blanket coverage of her book has launched the author and her charity into the forefront of anti-drugs campaigning in the UK. In 2010 Elizabeth was invited to lecture at the European Commission in Brussels at the "European Action Day on Drugs", which aimed to engage civil society towards the common objective of raising awareness of drugs and alcohol and the risks related to drug abuse, thus contributing to reduce the number of people, particularly youngsters, becoming addicted and dying. She also spoke at the Europe against Drugs London event in September 2010.

Elizabeth has now been invited to speak in the public interest in the UK and overseas at over 300 events. She has recently been co-opted on to the government’s Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs New Recovery Committee as the family and carers representative. She was nominated as a Woman of Achievement in 2009, 2010 and 2011 by the nominating committee of the Women of the Year Awards. Her book is currently in the process of being turned into to a play for the theatre.