SIR — Your correspondent Helen Jones (Chronicle letters, May 14), draws attention to the death on April 22 of a man from a drugs overdose in the public toilets. Apparently, he had also been in prison, beaten and in hospital.

The lady is surely right to say that addicts need sympathy and constructive help to get out of it; we must take some responsibility for such a miserable wretched death, in a city like Winchester.

However, her assertion that drug addiction is a ‘disease’ — that it’s just ‘luck’ whether people end up homeowners, or their children homeless and a drug addict — is perhaps not helpful, since what happens to us is largely dependent on willpower, personal effort and responsibility, and ability to make rational choices, skills that people in the circumstances she mentions at least need to feel are not unobtainable.

The most significant ‘luck’ involved is surely whether we were born to caring, literate, articulate parents in a stable relationship, who give personal attention.

No public state education or overburdened care system, or welfare handouts, with all its best endeavours, can be expected to compensate for that.

While many parents understandably need a bit of help, it’s only too clear from the appalling child abuse statistics that a significant number of people who have children are grossly incompetent to do so, and some criminally unfit; I’ve heard that a child a week dies from domestic abuse.

Our child benefit system undermines the family, and needs reform.

Rather than actively subsidising and motivating some of the very people to have children who are least fit to do so, as it has done for the last 40 years, putting collective responsibility for them onto the community, shouldn’t it incentivise them not to have children instead?

If it pays a woman, even if she’s herself a drug addict, child benefit and housing costs to have seven children by seven different fathers, is it any wonder if the unfortunate children end up mutilated, in care, on drugs, the street or the penal system for life?

Rosemary Conway, Westley Close, Winchester.