Value of drugs seizures: Cookstown £99K - Dungannon £700K

Between April 1, 2012 and November 30 of this year, the PSNI said they have seized drugs worth over £700,000 in Dungannon & South Tyrone.

But in the Cookstown area, the estimated street value of the drugs they have confiscated, barely makes up one seventh of that amount.

The drugs which were recovered by Dungannon police, said to have a street value of £709,001, include hauls of mephedrone, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and MDMA, amphetamines, Diazepam tablets and cannabis in its many forms.

While £99,406-worth of the same types of drugs were found across Cookstown, the number of police seizures was much less.

The 150 occasions in which drugs were seized in Dungannon is a 50% increase on the 98 such incidents that took place in Cookstown.

But with the number of arrests resulting from these crimes in both towns increasing dramatically from 2012 to 2013, the police may be getting somewhere in tackling drug-crime at street level.

In Dungannon 39 arrests were reported by police from April 2012 to March 2013, whilst in Cookstown 17 people faced the same

fate.

But from April 1, 2013 until the end of November, 59 people were taken into custody in Dungannon and another 28 in Cookstown — a marked increase in the number of police arrests in just one year.

The Dungannon and South Tyrone area, as well as Dungannon itself, takes in smaller towns like Coalisland, Moy and those in the Clogher Valley, while Cookstown’s police cover crime both in the town as well as Stewartstown, Moneymore, Ballyronan, Coagh, Ardboe and parts of Pomeroy.