According to students, the cards directed students to an Instagram account where they could buy drugs.
Residents remarked that the cards appeared only for a short period of time after they had arrived at university, possibly indicating that drug dealers were targeting freshers.
Professor Fiona Measham, Chair in Criminology at the University of Liverpool, highlighted this issue. She said she had warned “all summer to anyone who would listen” about the risks of students going back to university amid covid restrictions.
“Nightclubs are a semi-safe space... If you don’t have nightclubs open, you lose that safety net.”
This news came after Jeni Larmour, from Northern Ireland, and another fresher were found dead at Park View a few weeks ago. A 21-year-old Northumbria University student and an 18-year-old man from Washington, Tyne and Wear, who was not a student, also died in drug-related instances.
Prof. Measham continued: “Nightclubs are a semi-safe space, they have registered door staff and security, the bigger clubs often have paramedics, they have chillout spaces. If you don’t have nightclubs open, you lose that safety net.”
“My concern was that over the summer there were illegal raves and now the weather is turning bad, young people will be having parties in private residences but they won't have paramedics on hand.”
Instagram addressed the scale of the problem around the drug trade over social media. A representative of the social media company said: “We removed 1.4m pieces of drug sales content between April and June, 95% of which we found proactively. [But] we know there’s more to do."
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