Eighteen year-old Su fell from her bedroom window one morning. Admitted into intensive care at the hospital, she fell into a coma and sadly passed away after two weeks. Her father and brother couldn’t understand what had happened. A stash of cannabis tucked under her laptop in her bedroom gave the first clues. The toxicology report eventually revealed the full truth – that at the time of her fall, her body system contained methamphetamine, or 'Ice'.
The fact that she was on ‘Ice’ came as a complete shock to her father. He knew she smoked cigarettes and had begged her for years to stop. But it never occurred to him that she could also be a drug user.
Yes, she hung out with the wrong company in secondary school and had been hauled up several times for disciplinary matters. She had also performed poorly at polytechnic due to her lack of interest in the subject. Despite this, she had recently enrolled in a new course in criminology in a private school. Things were just looking up for a regular teenager who has the world waiting for her to explore. She was his beloved daughter, and in his eyes, always his baby daughter. How is it possible that she was also taking drugs?
Now, looking back, he realised there were warning signs of drug-induced psychosis even though he hadn’t understood them at the time. In the month before her unfortunate death, Su had been having hallucinations and showing signs of anxiety and paranoia. She complained of hearing children's voices at night and animal sounds coming from her room. She also said that she "felt very dirty" and that something or someone was following her.
One night, two weeks before her fall, she knocked on her father's bedroom door warning him of a monster in his room. Concerned, her father asked her if she was on drugs, to which she quickly denied. He dismissed this, thinking she might have been groggy from sleep. How would she get hold of them anyway?
But Su hadn’t been “groggy from sleep”. It was most likely the same drug-induced psychotic episode which again happened on the morning she fell from her window. Further investigations found that she’d been buying cannabis from a classmate while in secondary school and in the final year of her life. Her drug problem had then escalated and she’d begun to purchase “Ice”. Her father was devastated. "She was a very creative girl. She had so many things to look forward to. If I’d known, she was on drugs I would have reported her to CNB myself for her own good. Our lives were going so smoothly; I don't know why this had to happen."
*Names have been changed.
