A woman who concealed two ‘golf ball-sized’ packages of heroin and cocaine inside her body has been handed a four-and-a-half year jail sentence for possession with intent to supply.

Thirty-seven-year-old UK resident Nicola Christine Rock was the passenger in a white Ford Fiesta which was stopped by police on Bay View Road in Port St Mary during the night of June 22.

Though Rock voluntarily surrendered a small amount (one gram) of cannabis resin which she was carrying, police suspected that she was concealing drugs inside her body.

Rock was taken to A&E at the hospital, where she would later produce the two packages of the drugs, which she had been concealing inside her vagina – 20.1 grams of cocaine (valued by police at £2,010) and 7.7 grams of heroin, valued at £1,925.

Defence advocate Kate Alexander described Rock as coming from a ‘difficult background’ and having ‘not had an easy life’.

Ms Alexander added that she ‘regrets the life she has been living and the things she has done’, and was a ‘user of drugs who has unfortunately become a trafficker’.

In mitigation the advocate argued that Rock had a 17-year-old son, and that although he lived separately, was expecting a child, and with his father being estranged would lose the ‘support’ of his mother.

Deemster Graeme Cook reduced the sentence based on credit for her guilty plea.

However, an aggravating factor was what he described as Rock’s ‘lenient’ previous suspended sentence for a similar offence, given by Chester Crown Court – even though this sentence had expired.

It will be up to the prison system whether she serves the sentence here or the UK (which was her preference), and will become eligible for parole halfway through the sentence.

Rock will also be banned from entering the island for five years.