By The Guardian
Photos: YouTube Screenshots
When Jarred Shaw, an American basketball player in Indonesia, stepped down to the lobby in his apartment complex earlier this year to collect a package containing illegally imported cannabis gummies, he thought that the medicine to ease his Crohn’s disease had arrived.
It had – but so too had 10 undercover police officers. A video on social media shows Shaw, wearing a black T-shirt and shorts, shouting for help as the swarm of officers move to apprehend him.
The 35-year-old from Dallas, Texas, is facing the possibility of the death penalty or a long spell behind bars. He was a key member of Prawira Bandung, who won the Indonesian Basketball League (IBL) in 2023, and he has scored more than 1,000 points over three seasons in the country. But now he is languishing in pre-trial detention and is banned for life from the IBL.
“I use cannabis as a medicine,” he told the Guardian over the phone from a prison just outside Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, in his first comments to the press since his May arrest. “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.”
During the off-season Shaw lives in Thailand, where cannabis is subject to more liberal laws. He says he had endured the pain of going without cannabis in previous campaigns in Indonesia but says that health reasons spurred him to import the intercepted supply of 132 gummies this year. “I made a stupid mistake,” he says.
But that mistake should not warrant the death penalty or a long spell in prison…READ MORE
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