A TEENAGE smuggler who sold Class A drugs in a small North Yorkshire village has been jailed for 32 months.

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

Customs alerted police to Allen's activities after intercepting 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 some to his friends at four times what he paid for them.

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

“You were perfectly aware this activity was illegal,” 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.”

Allen, 19, admitted smuggling and offering to supply Class A drugs and possession of cannabis, a Class B drug.