A US basketball player is potentially facing the death penalty after he was discovered with $400 worth of drugs at his apartment.
Jarred Shaw, a 35-year-old athlete from Dallas, could either be handed the death penalty or sentenced to a long spell behind bars in the Asian country.
Shaw has been playing for Prawira Bandung, the 2023 Indonesian Basketball League (IBL) winners, but he has now been banned from the competition for life and is currently stuck in pre-trial detention.
Indonesia is well known for its incredibly strict stance when it comes to drugs, with three UK adults narrowly avoiding the death penalty after they were deemed to have smuggled in £300k worth of drugs using Angel Delight sachets.
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Another British grandmother remains on death row in the country, and has remained there for the past 12 years after smuggling £1.6 million worth of drugs in from Bangkok.
However, in Shaw's case, it was just $400 worth of cannabis gummies that saw him initially arrested, something he claims he takes to ease the symptoms of Crohn's disease.
He told the Guardian: “I use cannabis as a medicine. I have an inflammatory condition called Crohn’s disease that’s incurable. There’s no medicine apart from cannabis that stops my stomach from aching.”
Shaw lives in Thailand during the off-season, where cannabis has been legalised, but he suggests that health reasons spurred him to import 132 gummies to Indonesia earlier this year, in what proved to be a 'stupid mistake'.
He has spent the last five months in detention, and his contract with Prawira Bandung was terminated almost immediately after his initial arrest, but he suggests that his mistake shouldn't warrant such a severe punishment.
Shaw added: "There’s people telling me I’m about to spend the rest of my life in prison over some edibles. I’ve never been through anything like this.”
In the first two months after his arrest, he was at 'the lowest point in [my] life' and in a 'really dark mental place'.
The six-foot-10 forward is hoping that he can continue his basketball career but still hasn't been given a court date, and is forced to share a cramped prison cell with a dozen other men.
He concluded: "What they consider drugs, I consider medicine. It’s just different cultures.
“I don’t use it to have fun and go party. With my stomach condition, sometimes it’s hard for me to keep food down or go to the toilet. It just soothes the pain a little bit.”
Stephanie Shepard, director of advocacy at Last Prisoner Project (LPP), which campaigns for the release of people imprisoned for cannabis-related offences, said: “Jarred’s case is not an isolated incident. Around the world, people are serving extreme sentences for non-violent cannabis offences that pose no threat to public safety.
“These punishments run counter to international human rights standards."
Topics: Basketball, Drugs, Crime
James Moorhouse