A SMALL-time drug dealer has admitted to police he has made £36,000 a year from dealing in cannabis.

And the £100-a-day dealer from Rossendale was only a minor figure in the costly drug scene, Sgt Keith Willacy, community officer for Rawtenstall and Waterfoot, told the Valley's police liaison committee. He told the meeting that drugs were readily available in the area and anyone aged beteen 15 and 25 knew where to get them.

He added that Rossendale has a small drug problem compared with cities like Sheffield, where, in one area alone, the drug economy amounted to £13 million a year - the turnover of a medium-sized public company.

Sgt Willacy described the drug scene as 'a secret society,' where only first names were used and which police and community workers found difficult to penetrate. He said: "The information we get from young people is very thin because in the main they are frightened."

Eleven year olds in their first year at all the Valley's secondary schools are now being targeted for special education programmes by police and social workers.

But the father of a youth, recently jailed for 18 months for a crime connected to drug abuse, told the meeting it was as a schoolboy that his son first began to experiment with drugs after reading about them in a drugs encyclopaedia. He said: "The book described drugs like magic mushrooms and what they did, but it didn't tell you what effect those drugs would have."

His son, he said, had had to commit a serious crime before he was entitled to the counselling which helped him break his habit. But after being drug-free for three months, he was still jailed for the offence he committed in order to get money for drugs.

National statistics show 70 per cent of thefts and burglaries are now drug-related.

Divisional Superintendent Mike Griffin said stolen property sold locally for well under one third of its real value and getting rid of drugs would have a substantial impact on people's lives and the victims of crime.

He said: "Drugs are a massive problem and we do ourselves no favours by underestimating the consequences."

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