A DUDLEY grandmother turned to cannabis production after running up £5,000 worth of debts to catalogue clubs.

When police officers went to the home of Brenda Evans they discovered she had turned over two of the bedrooms to cultivating the controlled drug.

Paul Spratt, prosecuting, told Wolverhampton Crown Court there were ten plants in one room and a further £14 in the second and if they had all matured they could have produced up to £24,000 of cannabis.

When qustioned by officers after her arrest Evans said she met two men in a Birmingham pub and they had offered her £1,000 to look after the plants.

Evans said she had a significant number of debts and added that the electricity supply to her home had been by-passed to power what was a sophisticated growing operation.

The 48-year-old, of Cochrane Road, admitted producing cannabis and abstracting electricity and she was given a six month jail term suspended for a year.

Recorder Derek Chinnery further placed Evans on supervision for a year and told her the amount of drugs she had been growing was a matter for some concern.

He said: "When they were capable of being sold these plants could have been gone for a significant amount of money on the streets.”

Makhan Singh, for Evans said his client owed around £5,000 to catalogue clubs and that had left her with serious financial problems.