Students
jailed for a year after smoking pot while abroad
South China Morning Post. November 17, 1999
BARRY PORTER in Singapore
TWO students studying in Australia have been
jailed for a year after returning to Singapore with faint traces of drugs
still in their blood three weeks after smoking cannabis at an end-of-exams
party.
Film student Gavin Seow Lek Chen, 28, and his fiancee, Lynn Cheok Lye Peng, 22, a communications student, arrived home from Perth for their end-of-term break.
It was only when they later tried returning from a two-day break to Malacca in neighbouring Malaysia with Cheok's parents that they were stopped for a random urine test at a checkpoint.
They may have thought that since they took the drugs in Australia they had not breached Singapore's tough anti-drug laws.
But the island-state's Misuse of Drugs Act was changed last year after Chief Justice Yong Pung How upheld a 12-month jail term for Ecstasy consumption abroad in 1997.
Seow and Cheok are believed to be the first Singaporeans to be convicted under the altered law.
In passing sentence on Seow and Cheok, District Judge F. G. Remedios said: "All Singaporeans must be aware that consumption of drugs is dealt with very strictly here."
In Singapore, a mandatory death sentence is meted out to anyone, aged above 18, who is convicted of trafficking in more than 15 grams of heroin, 30 grams of morphine or 500 grams of cannabis.
Pleading for leniency, Seow and Cheok's lawyer Muraalidharan Pillai said the couple went to parties where it was common for the hosts to offer cannabis to guests. He stressed that attitudes towards cannabis consumption in Australia were less conservative to those in Singapore.
One of Cheok's fellow Singaporean students at Curtin University told the court: "Trying to get pot [cannabis] is normal. It's like asking for cigarettes."