When two young adults died after taking ecstasy at the Mutiny music festival last month, Ray Lakeman understood the bereaved parents’ nightmare better than most. In 2014, his two sons had been exactly the same age – 18 and 20 – when they travelled together to Manchester for a football match. The younger boy, a physics and astronomy undergraduate, had bought ecstasy on the dark web, which he and his brother took after the game. Police officers knocked on the Lakemans’ door two days later, to tell them their boys had been found dead in their hotel room.

“So I understand,” he says softly, “what those parents are going through. I can understand they’ll be absolutely furious.” The public appeal by one bereaved mother (“If nothing else I hope what happened to her will deter you from taking anything ever” ) was anguished but familiar, conforming to the convention of an ecstasy-tragedy narrative established by Leah Betts’s parents more than 20 years ago. “And I can understand them being confused and upset, and in terrible, terrible pain, and saying, ‘This has got to stop,’” Lakeman goes on gently. “But you’re not going to stop it by telling your kids not to do it. If that was possible, my boys would be alive now – and so would dozens and dozens and dozens of other people.”

Even Lakeman’s sons’ friends have told him it won’t stop them taking ecstasy. The dealer who sold the drug to his sons was sentenced to 16 years in December – in Portsmouth, just miles from the site of the Mutiny festival. “And that didn’t put other dealers in the city off, did it? So I find it quite strange when people who’ve lost loved ones say, we’ve got to ban it. Because banning it didn’t stop their loved one taking it. It didn’t save their family.”

Lakeman’s alternative strategy will sound wrong to many. But growing numbers of other parents have seen campaigns such as Just Say No fail to save their child, and want a new drug policy that works. For Lakeman, the solution is obvious. Instead of banning drugs, we should legalise them all.

‘They were full of life’: Torin (left) and Jacques. Photograph: Courtesy of Ray Lakeman

I meet him at the family home on the Isle of Man, where his sons Jacques and Torin grew up. Photographs of smiling, windswept boys line the shelves. To the north, the island is buzzing with motorbikes (the TT race season is underway), but from the living-room window we gaze out across peaceful grasslands to the Irish Sea. Lakeman tells me the island community is close-knit, but the yawning skies and rolling hills evoke a sense of wide-open spaces and tranquillity that feels as if it belongs in a much earlier decade. “If I wanted to,” he corrects me, “I could make a phone call and get any drug delivered to us within half an hour.”

Lakeman was still reeling with shock, days after his sons’ deaths, when the appalling predictability of the tragedy began to dawn. When his boys had been only seven or eight, they used to take dinghies out in the bay. “It’s who they were,” he says. “They did take chances, they were full of life. If they wanted to try something, they did. So, to me, it became illogical to expect Just Say No to work. It wasn’t inevitable that they would try drugs – but it was very likely. And people need to understand that about their own kids. The only thing that would have saved my boys was had their drugs been legal and regulated, so that they knew what they were taking. They didn’t have the faintest clue – and that’s what killed them. People shouldn’t die from making silly mistakes.”

What Lakeman finds “impossible to get my head around” is the law’s refusal to apply the principle of harm reduction to drug use. “Every single other aspect of our lives is governed by trying to make things as safe as possible. The only thing we don’t do it with is drugs. And I can’t explain it. Nobody has looked at it logically.” When politicians do debate drug policy, decriminalisation is the most radical case a brave few will dare make, but as this would “still leave drugs in the hands of dealers”, to Lakeman it is pointless. To make drugs safer, he says, we will have to legalise them, and regulate their manufacture and sale through state-controlled pharmacies. “You don’t have to like the idea to accept that it’s probably a better option than what we’re actually doing.”

When people object that it would be immoral for the state to sell harmful substances, he points out the flaw in their assumption that drugs are inherently dangerous. “The coroners and the police and health authorities, they all talk about a ‘recreational dose’. So they know how much is safe for recreational use, to produce the effect that people want.” It must therefore, he reasons, be possible for state pharmacies to “eliminate any danger completely”, by regulating purity and dosage.

It must be possible for state pharmacies to 'eliminate any danger completely', by regulating purity and dosage

On Tuesday, Lakeman will make this case in parliament, along with other bereaved families. The day of action is organised by a campaign group called Anyone’s Child, whose members hold our drug laws, more than drugs, responsible for their loss. The campaign’s eventual success feels inevitable to Lakeman (“Things are changing fast all over the world. It’s only a matter of time”) but he thinks it will be won by public opinion, not political pressure. All supporters of drug-policy reform are invited to join Tuesday’s mass lobby; MPs won’t change the law until voters want them to. “Politicians are scared of making a decision they’re afraid will make them unelectable. But young people’s views on drugs are very, very different from older people’s, and politicians are going to have to factor that in.”

Drawing parallels with Ireland’s abortion referendum, he suspects that personal testimony has the power to shift public opinion. “It would be really helpful for everyone who’s taken drugs to say so. Then people can see, these aren’t bad kids, these are normal kids, and then maybe they can see their own kid doing that.”

Parents who lose children to drugs usually blame the dealer, but Lakeman regards the man who sold the ecstasy that killed his sons as just another product of our drug laws. “This guy’s a businessman and he’s just filling a gap in the market, which the law has created. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been somebody else. He didn’t push these drugs on my boys. Torin searched him out. It was like going to Amazon. You’ve got to accept that the boys were doing something that they wanted to do.”

Two days before we meet, a young TT racer on the Isle of Man had crashed and died. In the course of our conversation, another crash takes another life. It occurs to me that had these young men died because we had made it illegal for them to know the size of engine on the motorbike they were riding, there would be public uproar. Were motorbike racing promptly banned for being dangerous, there would be equal outrage. Instead, mourners will almost certainly take comfort in the knowledge that the two riders died doing something they loved; however dangerous, their choice will be respected, and efforts to make the race safer redoubled.

Does Lakeman expect to see the law accord the same protection to youngsters like his sons in his lifetime? “Well,” he smiles sadly, “it won’t happen overnight.” It would be much easier for him to observe the Just Say No orthodoxy, I suggest, than to take on this fight. After losing both his children, does he wonder whether it is worth it?

“I could shut up, sure. I’ve lost everything; why should I be bothered what happens to other people’s kids? I could say, ‘Why should I be bothered if these kids die at the weekend? Let somebody else suffer the pain.’ But I won’t have it. It would be totally wrong. I won’t shut up because I believe in what I’m doing. And I think people are starting to listen.”

Anyoneschild.org