A drug dealing taxi driver spotted behaving suspiciously was caught red-handed with drugs and almost £2,000 cash.
Adam Rice, 29, denied supplying to passengers but admitted delivering cocaine wraps to drug users to pay off his gambling debts.
Derek Jones, prosecuting, told Liverpool Crown Court that on the evening of February 10 last year police saw Rice driving a Vauxhall Astra on Gorsey Lane, Litherland.
A man got into the vehicle and it drove off but the man got out again after a short distance and the suspicious officers stopped Rice in nearby Pendle Drive.
When the vehicle was searched they found 17 wraps of cocaine and £1,900 cash. In the glove box they found two snap bags of cannabis bush and cannabis resin, cigarette papers and cannabis grinders.
Rice admitted that he had been supplying drugs for two weeks and would get messages to deliver wraps to customers but did not supply passengers.
Mark Phillips, defending, said that Rice had been a taxi driver for four years. He had been given the 17 wraps earlier that day and would be telephoned telling him where to take them to. The cannabis found in the car was for his own use.
At the time he was sleeping on a couch at his mother's home and so had the cannabis and paraphernalia in his car as he had nowhere else to put them.
Mr Phillips said: "He is a decent young man and the offences spanned a short period of time. He is before the court for the first time," adding that Rice has already been punished in many ways.
Rice, of Chesterfield Road, Crosby, was jailed for three years today.
Judge David Aubrey, QC, said, "You had a gambling addiction and against that background you decided to gamble with your liberty in the hope you would not be apprehended.
"The message must go out to all that that if any taxi driver takes the decision to be involved in Class A controlled drugs and their supply, whatever the circumstances, whatever the background, they will lose their liberty.
"Inevitably a case such as this has an impact upon honest hard working taxi drivers who ply their legitimate trade.
"You were not plying a legitimate trade of taxi driving, you were plying an illegitimate trade of drug supplying there must be an element of deterrence,."
