Middle class drug users should not be treated leniently by the courts because they are fuelling “distressing” levels of knife crime among the young, the Lord Chief Justice said yesterday.

Lord Burnett of Maldon said there was a growing recognition that law enforcement should focus not just on drug suppliers but also that “users perhaps should be looked at in a less benign way.”

He said the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick was “absolutely right” that affluent drug users “should bear very much in mind the huge social damage that they are doing further down the chain.”

“She had in mind all the county lines problems that we have where particularly young vulnerable kids are being used to run drugs all over the country,” Lord Burnett told his annual press conference.