COVENTRY MESSAGE BOARD

It's estimated that Lee Jones and Wayne Smitten could have made as much as £77,000

Two men who ran a small commercial cannabis growing operation that could have produced more than £75,000 of the drug have been jailed.

Lee Jones, now of Barton Road, Nuneaton, and Wayne Smitten, of Jubilee Crescent, Radford, both pleaded guilty at Warwick Crown Court to producing cannabis over an 18-month period between May 2014 and November last year.

Smitten said the enterprise made him between £1,500-1,600 a month.

Police were called to Lee Jones’s home in Gilfil Road, Nuneaton, in November and inside they found six young cannabis plants growing in the loft and four in one of the bedrooms.

Officers also discovered cultivation tents, growing lamps and extractor fans, and the electric meter had been by-passed to provide the power for the equipment.

They arrested Jones and Smitten.

Jailing Smitten for two and a half years and Jones for two years, Recorder Gareth Evans QC told them: “At some stage in 2014 you two and probably another person decided to get involved in the cultivation of cannabis for profit.

“Each played a part. One was the driver and one was the gardener, and someone else just took the money for doing nothing. Nevertheless, you were each willing partners.

“People go into drugs in order to make money. I come to the conclusion that is the reason you two went into it, and you made a considerable sum of money.

“You knew when you went into this trade that the inevitable sentence if you were convicted of it was immediate custody and each of you will go away today because I cannot deal with it by suspending the sentence.

“But you Mr Jones will get a little bit more credit because you were a man of previous good character.”