A Dover mum-of-four, who won a small fortune on the National Lottery, has ended up selling heroin on the streets to pay for her habit.

Nina Hughes, 43, had the chance to turn around her life after her numbers came up and she won nearly £700,000.

Yet despite buying a couple of homes in Dover, she failed to tackle her heroin addiction, and was arrested peddling drugs to pay for her next fix.

Now a judge has told her: “You are still hell-bent on a path of self-destruction and are still in the thrall of Class A drugs.”

Hughes, of Priory Hill, was arrested under an anti-drugs swoop named Operation Victory which has seen nine people receive jail sentences totalling more than 26 years.

Tom Dunn, defending, said after a series of relationships with “inadequate men”, who let her down, she ended up bringing up four children by herself.

“She became homeless, began drinking and her life spiraled out of control but in 2005, after the birth of her fourth child, she enrolled at Dover South Kent College and became vice-president of the Students Union.

“Then an extraordinary piece of good fortune came her way when she won £691,000 on the National Lottery. She then bought two houses.”

Mr Dunn said she then met a drugs dealer who got her hooked on heroin, and she now sees herself as a victim.

“It has been a life of considerable challenges,” he added.

In the basis of guilty plea Hughes claimed she had been “chronically” addicted to heroin since 2013 after being introduced to it by her then partner.

She said the lover had obtained the drugs for both of them but was then remanded in custody in February 2015, and the “well-known heroin addict” had to buy her own.

Hughes said other addicts then took advantage of her and “she felt unable to turn them away” and she became “someone those higher up the chain felt they could exploit” by making her drive the dealer’s car around the town.

She later claimed she was threatened with violence if she “named names” after the police arrests.

Judge Simon James told her she was a person who blames everyone else but fails to take responsibility for her own actions.

“To balance your troubled childhood you were the subject of enormous good fortune in your life but that, it seems, was unable to persuade you to change your ways.”

Hughes, who admitted the drugs charge, was given a two year jail sentence suspended for two years and given a three month curfew order.

Eight other defendants, caught in the operation, received sentences up to six years and four months, including Kenneth Nightingale, 55, (five years eight months) and Alison Douglas, 49, (suspended sentence) both of Arden Way, Dover, and Matthew Dines, 30, (30 months) and Imran Hussain, 38, (18 months) of no fixed addresses but both living in Dover.