Virginia Ironside: I understand her parents' stance, but horror tactics will almost certainly fail

It's understandable that the parents of poor Rachel Whitear feel a desperate need to do something. They want to feel that if a video of her life, unveiled yesterday at John Masefield School in Ledbury, Herefordshire, will save just one other teenager from a similar death, then her life will not have been in vain.

I'm afraid I think it highly unlikely that the video will make the least bit of difference to any teenager.

True, they will be horrified to see a young girl turn from being a happy-go-lucky youngster like themselves into a "crouching corpse" found a couple of days after her death. They might have a couple of nightmares. But it will be extremely hard for them to relate this to anything that happens in their own lives. (And the video will be particularly ineffective for those who are most likely to become heroin addicts, people who have been truants from the age of 14, with broken homes, those who can't identify remotely with the middle-class girl from Herefordshire).

This video will be something ghastly that happens to "other people". After all, no teenager can possibly grasp the idea that he or she will die. On these pages a couple of weeks ago, the writer Jemima Lewis told of how disconcerting it was to find that after the funeral of a friend who died of a crack overdose, some of the mourners retired to "smoke a few rocks" in the garden.

Not only that, but they will soon learn, as they grow older – they may already have learnt it by the age of 15, in fact – that if you are careful it's highly unlikely that you will die of drugs. Most of them have probably taken Es, and many of them will have known people who use cocaine, have even tried heroin, with apparently no ill-effects.

When it comes to educating children about drugs, horror tactics simply don't work. Indeed, the scare tactics used around ecstasy only resulted in kids switching to cocaine, resulting in us become the country with the highest cocaine use in Europe.

What does work is being honest with them. "Yes, it's true that some people take E and it's fine, but no one knows what it does to the brain long-term." "Yes, it's true that cannabis appears harmless, and I smoked it when I was young, but there's new evidence that it can unhinge people who are predisposed to mental illness and it's more carcinogenic than was previously thought. If I'd known then what I know now I would have thought twice about smoking it." "Yes, some people do take heroin and don't appear to get hooked, but lots do, and is it worth the risk? It really would be the dumbest thing in the world to become a heroin addict; and not only that, your family would be horribly upset, so please don't give it a whirl – it's not worth it."

If you're a family with addiction problems in it, give them extra warning and say: "Do watch out for everything: alcohol, smoking, drugs. As a family we're weak when it comes to addictive things, so you have to be specially on guard."

Teenagers appreciate being told the facts. If they're treated like adults they become more responsible. If they're shown a hair-raising video, I'm afraid that whatever they say at the time of seeing it, it will go in and out of their brains as quickly as a horror video.

Only if this film is used as a starting point for honest discussion that isn't laden with unrealistic drama will it be of any use.