Unlike his fellow American basketball player, Brittney Griner, Jarred Shaw has received scant attention after being arrested for a drug offence abroad.
When Jarred Shaw, an American basketball player in Indonesia, stepped down to the lobby in his apartment complex in May 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 showed Shaw, wearing a black T-shirt and shorts, shouting for help as the swarm of officers moved to apprehend him.
Photo: AFP
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 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 said over the phone from a prison just outside Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, in his first comments to the media 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 lived in Thailand, where cannabis is subject to more liberal laws.
He said he had endured the pain of going without cannabis in previous campaigns in Indonesia, adding that health reasons spurred him to import the intercepted supply of 132 gummies this year.
“I made a stupid mistake,” he said.
However, that mistake should not warrant the death penalty or a long spell in prison, he said.
“There’s people telling me I’m about to spend the rest of my life in prison over some edibles,” he said. “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,” he said.
However, through prayer and his faith, as well as access to a prison gym, he is starting to feel himself again, even while the 211cm athlete shares a cramped cell with a dozen men.
“I just turned 35, but I still feel young,” said the former Utah State basketballer, who has played in Argentina, Japan, Turkey, Thailand and Tunisia. “I would love to continue my basketball career.”
Indonesia takes a hard line on drugs and carried out executions in 2016 by firing squad of an Indonesian and three foreigners convicted of drug offenses. More than 500 people — including almost 100 foreigners — are on death row in the country, mostly for drug-related crimes.
After Shaw’s arrest, Soekarno-Hatta Airport police chief Ronald Sipayung told reporters that the American could face life in prison or the death penalty if found guilty.
“We are still running the investigation to uncover the international drug network behind this case and to stop its distribution,” Sipayung said.
Shaw was swiftly paraded at a news conference, appearing with his hands cuffed, wearing an orange prison-issue T-shirt and a black face mask. He stood with his back to the audience as police chiefs exhibited the cannabis gummies, which weigh 869g in total and are worth US$400.
Shaw said that to charge him with possession of almost a kilogram of cannabis is unjust and “sick,” given that most of the weight is made up by the gummies themselves rather than the cannabis content.
Shaw is fundraising to cover his legal fees. He has not yet appeared in court despite being arrested five months ago, and is still waiting for a first appearance date.
“They’re making it seem like I’m this big drug dealer,” he said. “Why would I bring the candy here to sell? It was for personal use.”
The potential efficacy of cannabis on Crohn’s disease is understudied, but last month the journal Nature Medicine published a study which found that cannabis can ease chronic lower back pain without serious side effects.
There are parallels between Shaw’s case and that of Griner, the decorated American basketball player who was imprisoned in Russia for 10 months in 2022 after authorities found cannabis vape cartridges in her luggage. Griner was eventually released as part of a prisoner swap involving a Russian weapons trafficker.
The US embassy in Jakarta said it is aware of Shaw’s case but would not comment further.
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