TONY and Angela Wood will be eating Peking duck at a Chinese restaurant in Hornsby next Sunday, a tradition they established to commemorate the birthday of their daughter, Anna. She would have been turning 32 on that day and Peking duck was her favourite food.

It seems extraordinary that almost 17 years have passed since the 15-year-old schoolgirl died in October 1995 after having taken an ecstasy tablet at a rave party, combined with what a coroner later determined was a dangerous amount of water.

The tragedy rocked the state, generating headlines and soul-searching for weeks. Anna was an innocent abroad from an upright family and her fate tolled a warning to all parents: it could happen to your child.

''When we bump into some of her school friends … I hardly recognise them, they're so grown up,'' Mr Wood told the Herald. ''That's when you start to think 'What would she be like today?'''

The drugs policy issue has been reignited by a report from Australia21, a group of experts and high-profile citizens who have declared the ''war on drugs'' a failed policy and called for a debate on new directions. While many people, including the former head of the Australian Federal Police Mick Palmer, appear to have softened or changed their hardline views over the decade, the Woods remain staunchly opposed to retreat from all-out war.

''There's a small group of well-funded, well-versed individuals who are pushing for the legalisation of illicit drugs,'' said Mr Wood, who, at 69, still works as a private investigator. ''We can't allow this to happen.''

He wants a zero-tolerance approach, believing the nation's harm minimisation policy has failed. And he thinks the so-called ''war'' has been little more than a skirmish. He has no time for needle exchange or methadone programs, or the Kings Cross injecting room.

''We're not going to change until we get tougher on drugs,'' he said.

Mrs Wood is uninterested in the distinctions experts make between decriminalisation, legalisation and controlled use policies such as those applied to cigarettes and tobacco. ''I don't draw those lines,'' she said. ''Making drugs more available will exacerbate the problems.''

While the Woods act from gut feeling and high emotion, the former NSW police minister John Watkins, from Labor's Left faction, bases his support for the status quo on hard reflection.

The father of five - aged eight to 31 - counts himself lucky to have no firsthand experience of the impact of illicit drugs. Despite having grown up in the 1970s, he never tried marijuana.

''Alcohol was my drug of choice,'' he said.

Mr Watkins opposed the decriminalisation of drugs at the 1999 NSW Drug Summit, despite his faction supporting it. ''I've thought about it a lot between then and now and I'm still opposed,'' he said. He supports harm minimisation, diversion programs and sentencing options. But decriminalisation, ''whatever that means'', would lead to greater acceptance of drugs and, hence, greater use, especially by young people. It would not reduce harm and possibly increase it, he said.

When the Woods share their meal on Sunday with their daughter Alice, 34, her husband, Neil, and their children, Reg, 3, and Eric, three months, it will be a happy occasion. ''There are a lot of bad memories,'' Mrs Wood said, ''but Anna's birth was not one of them.''