MOTHER WAS HER CHILDREN'S DRUG SUPPLIER

A primary school teaching assistant who did not want her children to
get mixed up with drug dealers solved the problem by supplying them
herself, she admitted yesterday.

Speaking outside a magistrates' court in Suffolk after admitting
possession of and offering to supply cannabis, Nicola Cooper, 43, said
that she regretted breaking the law.

"Some people give their children alcohol and cigarettes at an early
age, but I gave mine cannabis," she said.

She described herself and her husband of 25 years, Ian Leppard, an
engineering company director, as being "liberal parents".

Cooper said that she had been an occasional cannabis smoker since she
was 18, and when she found out that her teenaged children had been
smoking the drug they all sat down as a family to discuss it.

Mr Leppard, 51, said: "We didn't want them to hide it, but told them
it was not big or clever and they should be responsible. We didn't
want them to get involved in anything else or the underground drug
culture."

Instead, their mother became their dealer.

Mr Leppard said: "Cannabis was something we just had in the house. We
have no idea how the police became involved."

But become involved they did. On June 15, Cooper was having dinner
with her mother at a hotel not far from her home in the village of
Ixworth, near Bury St Edmunds, when a police officer approached the
table.

He told her that he had a warrant to search her house. There he found
116 grams of cannabis resin, worth about UKP200.

Cooper told the police that she had been supplying her children
because she wanted to prevent them from becoming involved with dealers
and being lured into a world of harder drugs and crime. After being
charged with supplying the drug, she resigned from her job as a
support assistant at Barrow Primary School, near Bury St Edmunds.

Kevin McCarthy, defending, told St Edmundsbury Magistrates' Court that
it was ironic that she had effectively become a drug supplier to keep
her children away from other suppliers.

The court was told that she had started giving the drug to her
daughter when she was 16, and to her son when he was 18. Mr McCarthy
insisted that she was not a commercial supplier of the drug. "The
reason for the supply was to keep those cherished children away from
the drug culture," he said. "In the words of the police officer, 'You
did it out of the kindness of your own heart'."

The court also received a letter from the headmaster of Barrow School
describing Cooper as "a valuable member of staff". A local GP had said
that he would have "no hesitation in entrusting his young child to her
care".

District Judge David Cooper ordered Cooper to complete 200 hours of
community work, saying that he had decided not to give her a suspended
sentence because of her good character. She was ordered to pay costs
of UKP60. He said: "She has an excellent character, but to my mind she
is utterly misguided. Society does expect a school teacher to abide by
the law."

After the hearing Cooper said that she felt she had done "the right
thing" by supplying her children, but added that the whole family had
now given up. "The whole point was that it was a relaxing thing," she
said. "But there is nothing relaxing about it if you think the police
are going to burst into your home at any moment."