“You see the glamour, the fast cars, the thrill – but never the young person on their death bed, the kids living with parents with addiction.”For Stacey Jordan, whose sister Lucy died after taking cocaine eight years ago, the heartbreak of witnessing drug use in social circles, at festivals and on nights out never goes away.With cocaine consumption soaring – up by a quarter in five years in England according to latest government data – usage is often normalised in certain scenarios, and glamourised in popular culture through TV and film.But with a sharp increase in availability and purity, as revealed in an investigation by The Independent, the number of cocaine deaths have risen for 13 straight years, reaching 1,279 in 2024.For Stacey, it’s time people started talking about it more.In the summer of 2018, the 36-year-old got a phone call that her sister was in a coma in hospital after a line of cocaine triggered a heart attack. Rushing to her bedside, she said Lucy, who was aged just 24, looked unrecognisable. She died weeks later.“I refuse to allow my beautiful sister to just become another drug-related death, another number,” Stacey told The Independent.“She was not a druggie, she was a normal young woman who was happy and had big plans for her future. Her death shows cocaine can impact anyone, anyone – and I’m determined to show this to stop others going through the tragedy I’ve faced.”The sisters on holiday before Lucy's relapse (Stacey Jordan)Lucy was a “beautiful, full of life” university student in Bristol, in her third year of studying criminology and had future plans of travel and helping offenders, said Stacey. She had first taken drugs after getting into the wrong crowd through their mother’s addiction, said Stacey, but had returned to study after getting clean. She volunteered with Bristol Drugs Project, helping other users kick their addiction.However, within months of taking drugs again, she was kicked out of her student accommodation, isolated from friends and family, and later found face down on a sofa inside a drug den, suffering a cardiac arrest. “I ask myself all the time, was there more I could have done?” says Stacey. “But it all seemed to happen so fast, and the phone call came out of the blue.”Now, Stacey, mainly through a social media group called Live for Lucy, has been sharing her story to help others and to try to prevent more deaths.But she admits she finds it hard, with cocaine use seemingly all around her. Stacey found her sister Lucy brain dead in hospital after her cardiac arrest (Stacey Jordan)“You hear a comedian at a show talking about using cocaine, and everyone laughs,” she says. “But to me it’s not funny. It’s just like a person in a football team WhatsApp group sharing a picture from holiday of a line of cocaine, and everyone responds with laughs.“People are detaching talking about it, using it, from the damage it causes. I don’t see my life represented when people talk about it. You instead see fun, drama, to the point of it being glorified. This has to change.”Under the Conservatives, a 10-year drug strategy was launched, with an extra £523m placed into improving drug and alcohol treatment services. “We need better education for young people,” she says. “You ask a line of people at an event like the Cheltenham Festival what the dangers involved in taking drugs are, I’m not sure they would be able to tell you exactly.“But then, if you speak to someone considering Botox, who will have likely researched it and considered the side effects, they will be able to tell you. There should be no difference. We’re crying out for leaders on this issue.”Earlier this month, on the anniversary of Lucy’s death, Stacey went away on holiday, as she does each year. She cherishes a hair lock and handprint from her sister, and is proud to have completed many “bucket list” challenges in her name, from a 10km race to a skydive.“If anyone thinking about taking cocaine could just hear about my sister’s tragic story, it’d change many lives,” she says.