A TEENAGE smuggler who sold Class A drugs in a small North Yorkshire village has been jailed.

Rob Galley, prosecuting, said police found illegal crystalline Ecstasy of a very high purity in a safe in a caravan in the garden of Thomas Allen’s family home.

Customs officers had alerted North Yorkshire Police to Allen's activities after they spotted and intercepted a consignment of 250 Ecstasy tablets of lesser purity Allen had bought on the dark web and had had posted to himself from the Netherlands.

Messages on a mobile phone at his home showed he had offered to sell some of them at four times what he paid for them to his friends.

His barrister Helen Chapman said he had thought Ecstasy was a Class B drug, not a Class A drug, and that he thought it was safer to buy them over the internet rather than on the streets. He had had a drug addiction since he was 12.

“The fact is you were perfectly aware that this activity was illegal,” the Honorary Recorder of York, Judge Paul Batty QC told Allen at York Crown Court.

“You carried on with it in order to make money for yourself and to fund your own habit. You were well steeped in what you were doing at the time the customs officers intercepted that parcel.”

He jailed Allen for 32 months. Allen, 19, of Great Ouseburn, north of York, pleaded guilty to smuggling Class A drugs, offering to supply Class A drugs and possession of cannabis, a Class B drug.

When arrested at his place of work with a transport company, he told police he had cannabis for his own use.

Miss Chapman said Allen had only been 18 when he had committed his crimes and had confessed them to to police. She handed in a sheaf of references on his behalf.

Mr Galley said Allen told police he had spent about £1,000 buying drugs on the dark web using the internet currency bitcoin, and had bought the parcel that was intercepted for £490.