Boy’s death prompts call to ban glue

Press, 2 September 1986, Page 3

Boy’s death prompts call to ban glue

The sadness of the funeral of a Christchurch boy, Michael Smith, aged 13, who died from sniffing petrol has driven one woman to organise a petition to make solvent abuse illegal. “I do not want to see that happen to anyone else," said Mrs Kath Sweetman yesterday. “We must get it through to people that what happened to Michael can happen to anyone, whether they are a street kid or an everyday happy, healthy child.” Michael Smith died with his head in a tin of petrol in the garage of his home in Huxley Street, Sydenham, last month. His mother, Mrs Marlene Smith, said that her son — a keen and successful sportsman and sufficiently promising writer to have been chosen from his school to attend a young writers’ conference — had started to experiment with petrol sniffing about three months earlier.

Mrs Sweetman, a friend of the Smith family, said that the aim of the petition was to have solvent abuse made illegal. “That must help. If that cannot be done it should be illegal to sell glue to children under the age of 15,” said Mrs Sweetman. She has not yet

formally worded the petition or started to gather signatures but is sure that it will have popular support, especially from parents.

Support was offered yesterday by Mr Warren Smith, owner of a Christian bookshop in Christchurch, who is willing to circulate the petition via 200 contacts throughout New Zealand.

He hopes that it will give support to a private members’ bill being sponsored by the Opposition’s spokesman on the misuse of drugs, Mr Graeme Lee, which would give the New Zealand police some power to deal with solvent abuse.

“The time has come for a national speak-out on the problem,” said Mr Smith. “It is ridiculous for young people to be destroying their lives while the law allows nothing to be done about it.” Mr Smith said that for him, the solvent abuse law problem had been highlighted by two young, glue-sniffing girls slumped in the doorway of a shop he ran in New Brighton. One was completely flaked out. They didn’t want to do anything about it. I could not do anything about it, so I called the police. They couldn’t do anything about it,” he said.