A US national, who has lived in Taiwan for 10 years, was found guilty yesterday of growing cannabis at his residence in Changhua County and sentenced to four years in jail.
The Taiwan Changhua District Court handed down the sentence after finding that the defendant, 37-year-old Mark Alan Cartwright, violated the Narcotics Hazard Prevention Act (毒品危害防制條例), in which marijuana is listed as a category II narcotic.
Under the law, offenders who manufacture, transport, or sell category II narcotics are subject to jail terms of between seven years and life imprisonment.
They can also be fined up to NT$10 million dollars (US$334,000).
According to the court ruling, Cartwright was caught by Changhua police in April during a raid on his home in a residential building in Yuanlin Township (員林).
The police seized 286 cannabis plants, four bags of cannabis blossoms and one bag of cannabis extract paste in the operation.
During the trial, Cartwright defended himself by saying that selling and using marijuana are allowed in some other countries and areas, and that the marijuana he produced was used only for medical purposes and was not sold on the black market.
The arguments failed to persuade the presiding judge, who said the American man has lived in Taiwan for a decade — long enough for him to know that growing, manufacturing or using marijuana in this country is illegal.
Given that the defendant had a clean criminal record in Taiwan except for driving under the influence of alcohol and showed remorse for his actions, the judge gave him a lighter penalty than required by law, according to the verdict.
However, sentencing the defendant to jail was still necessary, because of the possible hazardous effects of the drug he produced, the court said.
The ruling can be appealed.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the