Drug addict mother gave son heroin

A drug addict mother who supplied her son with heroin and crack cocaine from the age of nine was jailed for nine years today.

A drug addict mother who supplied her son with heroin and crack cocaine from the age of nine was jailed for nine years in the UK today.

Hove Crown Court heard how Emma Kelly, 31, used to drive her son to see various dealers in London and Sussex and even provided him with a "wrap of heroin" at his school gates last May.

The boy spent a week in hospital withdrawing from his opiate addiction after he and his mother had been picked up by police for shoplifting in January last year.

Judge Anthony Niblett told Ms Kelly she had betrayed her son: “This was, in my assessment, an act of pure wickedness. You offered no explanation or excuse for it, and there can be none.”

Kelly realised that her son had been helping himself to her own drugs yet did nothing to wean him off them, he added.

The judge said: “You told a child psychiatrist that you realised you had a choice of informing social services of your son’s increasing opiate dependency. You allowed the situation to continue.”

He said she had lied to both social workers and schoolteachers: “You did nothing to help him and everything to harm him.”

The judge praised the actions of Sussex Police, but was not so fulsome in his praise of East Sussex social services.

He said: “The facts of this case speak for themselves. Despite an increasing number of warning signs, no direct action or intervention was taken in relation to X until police intervened at the end of January 2005.”

He welcomed the announcement that social services would provide a report to him within 14 days.