YouTube video helped drug user grow cannabis

Officers turned up at the house of Lance Daniel Turner on Newark Close, Mansfield, with a search warrant and found five plants in his hallway cupboard.

Admitting a charge of production of the Class B Drug, Mansfield Magistrates’ Court, it was heard how the 30-year-old suffered from anxiety, depression and agoraphobia and had regularly smoked the drug for 15 years to help clam him down.

In mitigation, his solicitor Michael Little said: “The fact that he was on YouTube shows this was not a sophisticated operation.

“The plants found were still weeks away from flowering and had not produced any cannabis.”

District Judge Tim Spruce gave him a two-year conditional discharge and made him pay £105 in costs.

He told him : “The growing of cannabis is becoming more and more prevalent and the sentencing guidelines is one that considers a custodial sentence, but I’m prepared to accept that your circumstances are different.

“You were growing it for your own medicinal use.”