SLASHER WAR UK
added: “It’s either you take a life or your life’s taken innit. You have to use them because you have to protect yourself.” Asked what they did day to day, she said: “We grind. Grind all day every day. What’s grind? Make money.
“We make money by supplying demand. Drugs – hard drugs, yeah, but we mainly do flavours, you know skunk, kush, Cali.”
She was referring to the growing demand for high-end cannabis – often imported illegally from California where it is grown legally in dispensaries producing the most sought-after strains in the world.
Shan Shan said: “We sell round here or we go OT or cunch.” OT means “out there” and “cunch” is short for country – both terms to describe the move to other towns by city-based county lines drugs gangs. She added: “We go OT to Ipswich for a couple of months or maybe Southampton for a couple of months. Wherever it is we wanna go. There’s plenty of money to be made and no-one knows who you are, get me?”
She showed us a pot of potent “death star” cannabis sold at £60 a pot. “We make £5 a pot and knock out at least
50 a day. People pay six grand for a box and we get a nice taste on that.” More and more girl gangs are carrying blades. We obtained a video of a female thug confronting a rival gang with an 8in blade in a busy street as terrified shoppers looked on.
The growing menace has spread across the country. There has been an upsurge in girl gangs in the West Midlands, where knife crime has soared by
72% in the last five years. Police on Merseyside are also dealing with more girl gangs than ever before. There were 83 female victims of knife crime in the first two months of this year. Worryingly, the girls are getting younger. In May a 15-year-old schoolgirl was sentenced to four years in a young offenders’ institute for stabbing two girls aged 13 and 15 with a bushcraft knife she stole from class. Some kids are even taking knives disguised as combs into class. We found them sold online for less than £5. Ex-offender Janice Nix, who works in probation, said the gang problem is rife. She added: “Anyone who says there isn’t is talking rubbish. It’s alive and it’s out there.” Theresa Cave launched the Put Down The Knife campaign after her son Chris, 17, was stabbed to death in Redcar, North Yorks.
She said: “Girls are just as bad as the lads for carrying knives. A lot of them hide them for gangs.
“A lot of them are scared to come forward for fear of reprisals.”
‘It’s either you take a life or your life’s taken. You have to use knives’
DAILY STAR SUNDAY SAYS – PAGE 6