The grandmother of a young Canberra man killed in a car crash on the Tuggeranong Parkway last week says more needs to be done to crack down on drug-taking among school students.
James Holt, 19, died last week when his car crashed near Kambah in the city's south.
Police said they had received reports earlier on Tuesday evening about a Holden Commodore driving dangerously in a number of Canberra suburbs, and made multiple attempts to intercept it.
The driver failed to stop each time, they said.
Officers eventually gave up the chase, and later that evening, about 10:30pm, the car crashed into a large street sign and a concrete structure on the road's southbound carriageway.
Mr Holt died at the scene, the fifth fatality on the ACT's roads this year, while three other passengers were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Police said the crash was being treated as a critical incident due to the involvement of police officers beforehand, and the Major Collision Team was investigating.
They said that at this stage speed was believed to have been the main cause of the accident.
But for Mr Holt's grandmother, the cause of her grandson's death goes back much further, to his early drug use.
'Gentle soul' first tried drugs at 14
Norma Holt described Mr Holt as a "beautiful person" whose life changed when he became a drug user.
"James was a very loving, quiet, gentle soul," she said.
While it is not yet known whether James was under the influence of drugs at the time of the crash, Ms Holt said they were inevitably to blame for the path they led him down.
"He got into trouble," she said.
"It went wrong from the first time he started in high school. He was smoking drugs from the age of 14, which he acquired at the school.
"The drugs changed his mind and he was led by his friends."
Ms Holt said James' drug use eventually led to criminal charges, and he was jailed for attempted aggravated robbery.
"You get onto drugs, you need money. You need money, you steal," she said.
Ms Holt said she wanted something to change in the wake of the accident.
She is calling on the police and education authorities to take action to protect young people from the effects of illicit drug use.
"We are so protective of the community with things like COVID, so that people don't die," she said.
Ms Holt said schools needed to do more to educate young people about the dangers of illicit substances.
She described James as a vulnerable young person, the child of a single mother who should have been better protected.
She also said she wanted to see more involvement from the police, calling for sniffer dogs at schools.
"We've got to get those drugs out of school, and sniffer dogs in school I think is a good idea — they could go round, they could detect the drugs," she said.
"My grandson was influenced from the minute he started in high school.
"Every grandmother, father, mother, cousin, aunt, uncle, we are suffering because our children are not being cared for by the community, and I want to see that change."
'We've got a long way to go': Chief Police Officer
ACT Chief Police Officer Neil Gaughan said the issue was one that the Canberra community needed to "have a serious conversation about".
"We do have a high usage of drugs in the territory per head of population, the wastewater tells us that — policing is part of the issue, but it's not the silver bullet," he said.
Commissioner Gaughan said of the six fatalities on Canberra roads in 2020, five involved drivers under the influence of methamphetamines.
"We've got that message out there with tobacco, we've got that message out there with alcohol to some extent. But when it comes to things like meth and coke and heroin, we've got a long way to go, so as a community I think we all need to do better," he said.
The ACT Education Directorate was contacted for comment.
