Prison for importing cannabis in 'chocolate' parcel

Friday 19 November 2021

A 24-year-old man, who imported cannabis resin hidden in Cadbury’s chocolate wrappers through the post and supplied drugs socially, has been jailed for nearly four years.

Brighton-born Jordan Arun Jones was sentenced in the Royal Court yesterday before Deputy Bailiff Robert MacRae.

Prosecuting, Advocate Julian Gollop told the Court yesterday that it was the Crown’s case that the quantities involved in the six charges against him represented the “bare minimum” of his drug dealing activities.

In January 2020, Customs officers seized a package addressed to him including a selection of sweets, chocolate and two Cadbury’s caramel chocolate wrappers inside of which four individually heat-sealed and clingfilm-wrapped packages of cannabis resin were found. 

Pictured: The sentencing took place in the Royal Court yesterday.

The following month, Customs Officers searched Jones’s home, finding a wooden box with “traces of brown matter” inside, a plastic wrap with white crystalline matter inside the pocket of a pair of jeans, £318 cash in a Whey protein container and more than £4,000 hidden in a pair of trainers covered in socks.

When interviewed by Police officers, Jones denied all knowledge of the postal importation.

He admitted, however, that the cannabis and MDMA found in his bedroom were his and that he was a regular user, who smoked “three or four joints a day” and occasionally used MDMA. 

Jones told Police that the container was his “change pot”, while the money in his shoes was said to be eight years’ worth of savings. 

He claimed that he would “withdraw money from his bank account and put it into his shoe as he did not trust banks.”  

When he went to Elizabeth Terminal to be charged in January 2021, Customs officers found a small black container in his pocket containing what was described as a “resinous material”. He told officers he had forgotten it was in his pocket and that he smoked 12-13g of cannabis per week. 

Messages on a third party’s phone which had been seized during the Police’s anti-drug dealing ‘Operation Shark’ campaign indicated that Jones had supplied herbal cannabis, cannabis resin and MDMA over a year, and collected “significant” amounts of money in return for drugs. 

Pictured: Jones was sentenced to three years and nine months behind bars.

An expert for the Crown said the money in the trainers was likely to be the proceeds of dealing drugs at street level. 

He found that the minimum total street value of the drugs seized from Jones would have been £2,890.

The Crown accepted that some of the drugs were for his personal use, as well as supplying to friends, and it was decided that he should be sentenced for the social supply of 4g of MDMA and the social supply of 170g of cannabis resin. 

Analysis of Jones’s phone showed he had discussed supplying MDMA to a third party, and offered to supply cocaine. 

The Crown suggested that the mobile phone analysis was only a “snapshot” of his drug dealing activity, as further analysis of the phone showed repeated use of applications Wickr and Signal, whose messages are encrypted in a way that means they cannot be recovered forensically.

According to Advocate Gollop, analysis of his bank accounts resulted in some “unexplained” income being identified, leading to an estimate of the total Jones benefited from criminal conduct to be £8,300.39. 

The Deputy Bailiff, sitting with Jurats Jerry Ramsden, Steven Austin-Vautier and Dr Gareth Hughes, handed down a sentence of three years and nine months’ imprisonment yesterday. The Court also ordered that the drugs be destroyed and made a confiscation order of £4,491.