Yet another young life hits the rocks - in this case, quite literally. One minute Sonny Wells, 20, was out “tombstoning”, a daredevil practice that involves leaping from high places into shallow waters; the next, having miscalculated the depths, he was permanently paralysed. Within a couple of days, dreadful pictures of him graced print and screen as he lay in a hospital bed, bare flesh exposed and tubes all over, thus taking his place in a macabre gallery of images that is already too familiar.

He looked very much like that ghastly close-up of Leah Betts, also lying unconscious just before her death, which, it was thought at the time - though later disproved - happened because she had been poisoned by an Ecstasy tablet swallowed on her 18th birthday. And then there came even worse: the kneeling corpse of 21-year-old Rachel Whitear, heroin syringe in hand and skin already mottled with decay.

In each case, the pictures were made public by parents who swore that they were doing so in an effort to warn others against making the same mistake. In each case, although I do not believe them actually to be lying, nor do I quite believe them either. It is more likely that they are touched by the same bewildered grief that we see when dead children are plucked from rubble or flood and their parents hold their small bodies in arms beseechingly outstretched: “Look! Look at my darling, look at my loss!”

In any event, even if they do think that they may discourage others, deterrent effect is unproven. Pressure group Drugscope has studied the form and concluded that: “There is little evidence that such shock tactics actually work in changing behaviour.”

And so, for no good reason, these young people are victims twice: first of their tragedy, then of a stripping of their dignity, an unbearably intimate intrusion into their privacy and nothing gained save possibly a sating of our prurience.

Their consent cannot be sought or even implied. Indeed, given the vanities of that age group, it is inconceivable that any would wish to be seen as, say, Leah Betts was: tongue lolling, eyes clouded, pathetic, helpless, ugly - let alone that they would wish for that to be the enduring memory of them among their friends.

We cannot blame the parents; they make these decisions when least capable of reason. But others, free of pain, are involved in the taking and copying and transmitting and screening and publishing and it is they, I fancy, who might decently pause for second thought.

I have in front of me the cuttings, pictures and lurid headlines on Rachel Whitear. Looking at them again, eight years after her death, it really does seem that for one, short lifetime's mistake, it is a grotesquely disproportionate punishment to spend an eternity as “the heroin death poster girl”.

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