ELITE police hit squads yesterday raided suspected drugs dens across Inverclyde in a series of co-ordinated swoops — just hours after a blanket ban on so-called ‘legal highs’ came into force.

The Greenock Telegraph joined a convoy of 14 marked and unmarked law enforcement vehicles as it made its way out of the town’s police HQ shortly after 8.30am.

Within minutes we were at the first targeted address, in Port Glasgow.

Officers sprinted along Highholm Street wearing protective headgear and headed into a block of flats before using a battering ram to force open the door of a suspected dealer.

Shouts of ‘Police!’ echoed through the common close as startled residents looked out of their windows to see a fleet of patrol cars, cell vans and a dog unit vehicle parked in the road.

The operation was the latest in a programme of intelligence-led anti-drugs deployments within Inverclyde.

These exercises have seen the life-ruining enterprises of around 200 peddlers disrupted in the past two years alone.

The latest one came under the auspices of existing narcotics legislation but there was no mistaking the timing.

It took place less than nine hours after the selling and production of legal highs was outlawed throughout Scotland and the rest of the UK.

Legislation criminalising products otherwise known as ‘new psychoactive substances’ began just after midnight yesterday.

The dangerous chemical concoctions, which are sold under names such as ‘Spice’ and ‘Black Mamba’, are designed to give users similar effects to those experienced through drugs such as cannabis and cocaine.

Legal highs were linked to more than 100 deaths in the UK last year and a rise in violent assaults.

Just minutes after the initial Inverclyde bust, plain-clothed police commanders mobilised a separate team to hit another door just 200 yards away from the first as activity within the Port intensified.

The Telegraph followed in a marked vehicle — our driver, Sergeant Danny Godfrey, springing into action as soon as he got the call to ‘go, go, go’ on his earpiece.

A further two raids were to follow elsewhere in the district before officers later took stock of the overall operation.

The Telegraph told in March how police had ‘taken out’ nearly 170 drug dealers in Inverclyde in the two years since area commander Elliot Brown declared war on them. 

Chief Inspector Brown — who had just celebrated his second anniversary in charge of the district’s policing operations — told how the raids on dope dens had increased by a fifth year-on-year.

And in a stark warning to the criminals — whose activities have spawned a catalogue of violent offences and robberies in our towns — he said that the swoops on remaining dealers will ‘only intensify’.

Ch Insp Brown told the Telegraph: “We will continue to disrupt the operations of the dealers by utilising all the means and powers that we have at our disposal in order to remove their poisons from our communities.”