When Daniel Mervis succumbed to a serious, and ultimately fatal, cocaine addiction he developed while studying at St John’s College, Oxford, his grieving parents reached a surprising conclusion.
They did not, as some might have been tempted to do, accuse the college authorities of failing to take drug taking seriously. Quite the opposite.
In fact, St John’s had a strict, ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to substance abuse.
But that, says Daniel’s father, Hilton, was the problem. Along with other colleges and universities around the country, St John’s had failed to grasp the sheer scale of drug-taking among British students, he suggests, or the depth of
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