A BENEFIT claimant was jailed for five years on Tuesday after he was caught with high purity cocaine that could have produced 11 kilos of the drug worth up to £440,000 on the streets.

Calum Morrison admitted to police, after he was detained, that he was bulking out the Class A drug to supply others.

A judge told Morrison (39): “The quantity of drugs involved in this case is, on any view, significant.”

Judge Robert Weir QC said at the High Court in Edinburgh: “You were actively involved in the purchase and adulteration of cocaine for onward supply.”

The judge told Morrison that a prison sentence was “inevitable” and said he would have faced a jail term of seven and a half years but for his early guilty plea.

The Court heard that officers armed with a search warrant turned up at Morrison’s home in Union Street, Cowdenbeath, after confidential information was received that large amounts of drugs were being stored in the flat.

Police found unemployed Morrison, who received £70 a week in state benefits, alone in the flat with bags of cocaine and packages of the cutting agent benzocaine.

A total of 1.1 kilos of cocaine was found along with 1.3 kilos of the adulterant commonly used to bulk out the drug.

Advocate depute, Lisa Gillespie, earlier told the Court that some of the cocaine’s purity was as low as three per cent but almost half a kilo of the drug was 70 per cent pure.

The prosecutor said that if the latter amount was adulterated to three per cent and sold in street deals it was worth between £220,000 and £440,000 and could have produced in excess of 11 kilos for sale.

The prosecutor said Morrison was taken to Dunfermline Police Station following his detention on November 10 last year.

“When he was interviewed he admitted that the items recovered in the house were his and that he had been adulterating cocaine for onward supply,” she said.

Morrison admitted being concerned in the supply of the Class A drug November 3 and 10 last year, at an earlier court appearance last month.

Defence solicitor advocate, Gordon Martin, said that Morrison was in debt at the time after he had taken out a loan from “a non-legitimate source”.

“He accepts that he allowed himself to be persuaded to become involved in this particular enterprise,” said Mr Martin, “He regrets his involvement and has accepted his guilt at an early stage”.