Quelle: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/ ... basketball‘I use cannabis as medicine’: the US basketball player facing execution in Indonesia over $400 of gummies
Unlike his fellow basketball player Brittney Griner, Jarred Shaw has received scant attention after being arrested for a drugs offence overseas
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, he says. “There’s people telling me I’m about to spend the rest of my life in prison over some edibles,” he says. “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”.
“I felt helpless and alone,” he says. “I didn’t want to wake up again.” But through prayer and his faith, as well as access to a prison gym, he is starting to feel himself again, even while the 6ft 11in athlete shares a cramped cell with a dozen men. “I just turned 35 but I still feel young,” says the former Utah State basketballer, who has played in Argentina, Japan, Turkey, Thailand and Tunisia. “I would love to continue my basketball career.”
Shaw, who plays as a center or power forward, says cannabis helps ease his anxiety and depression, as well as insomnia and the pain from Crohn’s. “I don’t use it to have fun and go party,” he says. “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.”
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.