COURT: Defendant, stand up, please.
Defendant, you have pleaded guilty to two serious offences.
Trafficking in dangerous drugs is always serious. We are dealing here with quite a high amount of approximately 265 grammes of ketamine. You may view it as a party drug; we in the judiciary view it somewhat differently.
You are a man with a criminal record involving drugs, but it is not a heavy record. It weighs with me that, from the very outset, you were cooperative with the police, and you entered your plea of guilty to both charges at the first available opportunity, namely before the Magistrates Court. I also accept that part of these drugs would have been for self-consumption. However, it is very difficult to work out exactly how much, and I must confess that the approach put forward by your counsel does commend itself to me.
I take into account what has been said in all the letters, and hope that your remorse is profound and genuine. Having said that, you do appreciate that there has to be a substantial prison sentence in this case. There being two offences, my approach is to deal with it as one amount of drugs, but of course, I have got to sentence on each offence.
On the 1st offence I take a starting point of 6 years’ imprisonment. Given your plea of guilty at the earliest opportunity that is reduced to 4 years.
On the 2nd charge which involves a higher amount of drugs, I take as a starting point 7 and a half years, reduced to 5.
Now, the actual sentence to be served will be 16 months consecutive to the 1st charge, that is, 64 months. That is equivalent to an 8-year sentence with a one-third discount, and 44 months will be concurrent.
Now, in my computation of sentence, I have made an allowance for the fact that part of the dangerous drugs would have been used for self-consumption, so therefore you will go to prison for a period of 5 years and 4 months.