A DRUG addict who has spent the bulk of his adult life in jail was back behind bars last night for selling drugs within weeks of being freed from his last sentence.

Damien Fleming had nowhere to stay when he returned to Darlington after his release early last year, and resorted to living from his car.

But after being traced and beaten up by drug dealers for a debt he owed before being locked up, the 38-year-old started selling cocaine to help pay them off.

Fleming and his new girlfriend, Donna Clark, were put under surveillance by police after they stopped his car and found it contained drug-dealing paraphernalia.

Officers watched the couple for four months and saw them supply visitors to a house in Chambers Street, which Fleming had access to, as well as people in the street.

Fleming was stopped in a car several times in March and April, and each time he had hundreds of pounds, small plastic bags for wrapping drugs and scales with him.

John Gillette, prosecuting, told Teesside Crown Court that on one occasion, police also found a wooden-handled axe by the driver's seat of Fleming's car.

Police finally swooped after following the couple to Stockton on June 7, and found hundreds of freezer bags, scales, five mobile phones, seven crack pipes and a number of phone SIM cards.

Fleming swallowed two bags of drugs - one containing £2,100- worth of cocaine and the other prescribed medication - and became ill until he passed them two days later.

Peter Makepeace, for Fleming, said: "That was a massive risk to his life, but the reality is that at that time his life was practically worthless to him any way.

"There is no suggestion here of any sort of high-life - quite the opposite. This is the very seediest side of drug-dealing one can imagine."

Jonathan Walker, mitigating, said Clark had gone from a longterm abusive relationship to one with Fleming.

He said: "Her direct involvement with this was limited in the extreme."

Mother-of-two Clark, of Lismore Drive, sobbed as she was jailed for 18 months after admitting being concerned in the supply of Class A drugs.

Fleming admitted the same charge, as well as having a bladed instrument, obstructing a police officer and possession of the drug Subutex, and was jailed for six years. Judge John Walford ordered that Fleming should first serve 18 months from his previous sentence, from which he was released early.