A young autistic man found to his cost that the £4,000 he’d borrowed to cover household bills was owed to drug dealers moonlighting as loan sharks.

When Londoner Roshan Walker fell behind with his bills, he borrowed the cash from what he thought were loan sharks.

His flat was burgled and the cash stolen by the thieves. The break-in was reported to the police, but cashless Walker found himself under pressure from his creditors to work off the debt by dealing drugs.

Prosecutor Richard Witcombe told Oxford Crown Court on Friday (April 28) that a police officer was on patrol in Banbury on February 18 last year when he saw 25-year-old Walker apparently dealing to a group of people before returning to a flat in Gatteridge Street.

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The suspected transaction was sufficient for officers to, later, raid the property. Walker was inside together with someone ‘recognised to be a local drug user’.

The police found more than £813 in cash, two mobile phones, and a slip of paper on which had been written ’35W 25D’, with the slang for ‘white’ crack cocaine and ‘dark’ heroin substituted by the letters ‘W’ and ‘D’.

A tub of Vaseline was found in his jacket pocket, raising suspicions that the dealer may have plugged drugs up his bottom.

That suspicion turned out to be accurate. At the police station Walker eventually passed more than 200 wraps of drugs with an estimated value of £4,800.

Mr Witcombe said the phones were analysed and messages found linking the user of the drugs line phone to arranging the packaging and sale of crack cocaine and heroin.

Walker, of West Norwood, London, pleaded guilty on the morning of his trial to possession with intent to supply class A drugs. Although he had previous convictions, there was nothing on his list for dealing drugs.

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Mitigating, Stephen Akinsanya said his client was on the autistic spectrum. “One of the issues he has is he doesn’t manage his money very well,” the barrister said.

When he found himself struggling with his bills, he took out a cash loan for £4,000. After the money was stolen in a burglary, ‘he then found himself in debt to what he discovered were the drug dealers’.

Recorder Ann Mulligan, sentencing, told Walker that he had pleaded guilty to ‘very serious offences which call for a lengthy immediate custodial sentence’.

But she said the defendant had a ‘great deal of mitigation’, which allowed her to suspend the two year prison sentence for two years.

As part of the suspended sentence, Walker must do up to 31 rehabilitation activity requirement days and wear a GPS monitoring tag for six months.