A BRADFORD landlord has been fined for “putting people’s health at risk” by running a sideline selling viagra tablets over the bar of his pub.

Police found more than 500 tablets during a raid on the Ring O Bells pub in Queensbury, run by 61 year-old Leslie Bradshaw on behalf of Punch Taverns.

He pleaded guilty to a charge of administering a medicinal product when not an appropriate practitioner at Bradford and Keighley Magistrates’ Court.

Prosecutor Nadine Clough told the court that officers executed a drugs warrant on the premises on May 20 this year and found a “large quantity” of tablets in a flat above the pub, where Bradshaw lived and had been landlord for 13 years.

Around 200 Kamagra tablets were seized, alongside more than 300 Sildamax pills and a quantity of small plastic bags.

Miss Clough said Bradshaw made full admissions to police, saying he had stockpiled the tablets over a number of years, and used to sell them to customers.

He said that in the past, lots of people had bought the drugs, but the trade tailed off when his customer base changed and the pills were left unsold. He stated that now, he only occasionally sold a couple of tablets at a time, selling them for £1 a pill, making around 25p of profit on each one.

Miss Clough said Bradshaw was charged because of the “volume of tablets found in the property.”

Lisa Julian, mitigating for Bradshaw, said he had originally bought the tablets for himself online.

When chairman of the bench, Captain Alan Wrigley, responded with: “All 500 tablets?”, she said he had “bought different types to try them out”, but now no longer took the pills.

She said he had only sold tablets to customers he had known for years, not “unknowns”, adding that those who bought them were often people who didn’t want to approach their doctor for a similar prescription.

She said Bradshaw was not selling “street drugs” and would only have made a total profit of between £100 and £125 had he managed to sell all of the tablets.

Magistrates chose not to send the case to Crown Court, but Captain Wrigley said that didn’t mean they considered it a “trivial” matter.

He told Bradshaw: “You may have thought that all you were doing was selling a few harmless tablets, but there are potentially serious side-effects and you are not qualified to make those judgements. You were potentially putting people’s health at risk.”

Bradshaw was fined £250 and ordered to pay £85 costs and a £30 surcharge.