A program designed to use students as drug informants has ended in tragedy.

Blake Neff of the Daily Caller reported.

UMass: Maybe Spying On Students Was A Bad Idea

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has announced that it will end a program that recruited students as police informants after the practice contributed to the heroin overdose death of one of its students.

UMass’s flagship campus has its own 61-member police force, and through 2014 it relied extensively on a web of informants to combat drug use at the school. That practice will end immediately, the university announced Wednesday.

“After careful consideration, I’ve concluded that enlisting our students as confidential informants is fundamentally inconsistent with our core values,” chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy said in a statement released by the school.

The program was originally suspended last September after an investigation by The Boston Globe found that one of the informants used by UMass police, known only as Logan, had died of a heroin overdose in 2013. The student had agreed to help campus police in order to avoid being hit with drug charges, but as a consequence he never received help for his addiction and his family remained unaware of the problem.

Logan’s parents have since sharply criticized the informant program, saying it prevented them from helping their son. His mother even speculated that Logan may have been poisoned by a drug dealer who knew about his informing activity.