PSNI steps up war aganist drugs

17 September 2012 Last updated at 02:07 ET By Gordon Adair District Journalist

How best to fight the war against drugs - try to catch the elusive Mr Bigs or try to disrupt and destroy the sprawling network of dealers selling directly on our streets?

The answer, of course, has to be both, but - for the past few weeks - the police in Northern Ireland have been piling the pressure onto street level dealers.

The PSNI's Operation Torus been running since August and in just a few weeks, it has seen more than 1,100 searches of people and properties and almost 200 arrests.

BBC Northern Ireland district journalist, Gordon Adair, joined one group of officers taking the fight - literally - to the dealers' doors.

As he scrambles back to his feet, the uniformed officer counts out the deals. "One, two let me see eight; eight altogether Sarge".

Each deal is a small block of cannabis resin, wrapped in silver foil. They were hidden under a hedge in the garden of a terraced house in the Enniskeen estate in Craigavon. Each is worth about 20.

A short distance away a small bag of herbal cannabis and, in another hedge, a balaclava is found.

"We see this all the time," a detective tells me. "The dealers hide drugs in the gardens of nearby houses, not their own, so that they can't be linked with them.

The people in those houses are often pensioners, often living on their own, and they're terrified.

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PSNI steps up war aganist drugs