(The Australian) Robert Paul McJannett, 48, was arrested after arriving in Bali with his adult son on a Virgin Blue flight from Perth…

Bali police allege McJannett was carrying the marijuana in a plastic bag in socks in his luggage.

The head of the Bali Police Drugs Squad, Colonel Kokot Indarto, said police intended to charge McJannett with article 112 of the narcotics law for carrying drugs from abroad, which carries a penalty of more than five years’ jail.

“Because he carried more than two grams, this could not be indicated as users because users limitation is only 0.15 gram. That’s why he’s aimed with carrying drugs,” Colonel Indarto said today.

Robert Paul McJannett is taken away by an Indonesian policeman after being arrested for drugs at a Bali airport. Picture: Lukman S. Bintoro Source: The Australian

That sound you heard was the sound of a million experienced cannabis consumers slapping their foreheads and exclaiming “150 milligrams of pot!?!”  Yes, Indonesia considers you a dangerous international drug trafficking kingpin if you are in possession of more than 150 milligrams of cannabis.  For the metrically-challenged, that’s a little more than 5 thousandths of an ounce.  Or as comedian Ron “Tater Salad” White said, referring to his bust for 875 milligrams of marijuana, “They found 7/8s of a gram of marijuana in my bag. Now when I have 7/8s of a gram of marijuana I consider myself to be out of marijuana.”

(Charlotte Observer) Indonesian prosecutors have charged an Australian man with drug smuggling and are seeking a 15-year prison sentence after a small amount of marijuana was found in his luggage as he arrived on the resort island of Bali.

Customs officials say 48-year-old Robert Paul McJannett of Perth had 1.7 grams of cannabis hidden in socks inside his suitcase when he arrived at Bali’s Denpasar airport in December.

Prosecutor Nyoman Sucitrawan told reporters Wednesday that McJannett has been charged under Indonesia’s strict narcotics law, but that officials will not seek the death penalty because the amount of marijuana found was relatively small.

More than that much weed and you're a drug trafficker in Indonesia. By the way, the penny weighs almost 1½ times more than the weed McJannett is charged with.

So since the total amount was less than a sixteenth of an ounce, Indonesia won’t hang the man.  They’ll just keep him in a cage for over twenty years, because he also faces a four-to-twelve year sentence for the possession of the cannabis.  The 15-year sentence mentioned above is only for the importation of the cannabis into Indonesia… yes, bringing it into Indonesia and having it in Indonesia are two separate crimes.

How incredibly unjust that Indonesia may soon have two Australians in prison for twenty years for cannabis.  We’ve reported previously on the case of Schappelle Corby, but she was caught at the airport with nine pounds of cannabis in her boogie board bag.  That doesn’t make her imprisonment any more reasonable, but McJannett facing the same term for 2,400 times less cannabis just highlights the tragic absurdity of Indonesian drug laws.

CNN’s “Going Green” segment just reported on the environmental threat posed by the worldwide demand for palm oil:

(CNN) In supermarkets across the world products containing palm oil regularly fly off the shelves — soaps, chocolates, margarine, cosmetics.

Most consumers have no idea that they contain palm oil which often hides behind the label of “vegetable oil” and even less of a clue that conservationists are singling it out as being one of the main driving forces behind deforestation.

It is fast growing with high yields — global demand now tops 40 million tonnes a year and is central to the economies of Malaysia and Indonesia.

But the rampant tearing down of Indonesia’s natural forests have made this tropical nation the world’s third largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Already, 85 percent of Sumatra’s forests are gone and what is left is disappearing at an alarming rate.

Sumatran orangutans are expected to be the first great ape to become extinct — due to the loss of their natural habitat, just one of many species threatened because of unchecked deforestation.

Sorry about your home forest, Clyde.

Hmm, it sounds like if we want to save our primate cousins and the atmosphere we breathe, we need to come up with a fast-growing, high-yield seed oil crop that doesn’t lead to deforestation and acts as a huge carbon sink for greenhouse gases.

Let me give you a moment to see if you can think of one off the top of your head.

I decided to look up the website of the American Palm Oil Council to see what sort of benefits we get from deforesting Indonesia and wiping out an ape species so we can have Valentine’s chocolates.  For comparison, I got some information from various sources on hemp seed oil.

Hemp seed oil can’t completely replace palm oil.  Palm oil produces the most oil per hectare of any seed oil crop and is a better frying oil than hemp seed oil.  But obviously hemp seed oil can make products like soap, shampoo, plastics, and biodiesel as well or better than palm oil, with the additional benefit of providing stalks for fiber, seeds for food, and flowers for medicine.  Hemp requires few pesticides and no herbicides and we don’t have to wipe out any orangutans!

Executions for Drug Crimes Are Resumed in Indonesia – NYTimes.com
JAKARTA, Indonesia — This country has resumed executions for serious drug crimes after a four-year hiatus, and Indonesia’s attorney general has warned drug offenders on death row that their executions may now be accelerated.

The resumption follows a decision last year by Indonesia’s Constitutional Court that upheld the death penalty for serious drug offenses.

Two Nigerians convicted of drug trafficking were the first to be executed for drug crimes after the long break. The two, Samuel Iwachekwu Okoye and Hansen Anthony Nwaliosa, were put to death on June 26.

All executions in Indonesia are by firing squad. Prisoners are taken to a field to stand in front of 12 men who each fire one shot aimed at the chest. If that barrage does not kill the prisoner, a commander stands ready to fire a point-blank shot to the head.

…Last October, the Constitutional Court ruled that a constitutional amendment upholding the right to life did not apply to capital punishment. The court added that the right to life had to be balanced against the rights of the victims of drug trafficking.

Indonesia executed the two Nigerians on the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, as a message to those trafficking drugs through the country.

Indonesia is fighting an epidemic of drug abuse. Its population of 238 million includes an estimated 18 million addicts, according to the Ministry of Health.

I’d be interested to know who the Ministry of Health counts as “addicts”, because we’re talking about 7.5% of the population (probably more if we factor out children, since it’s mostly the teen and young adult population we’re talking about.)  Here in the US, where we have no death penalty for drug trafficking, government surveys show 20 million Americans used any illicit drug in the past month.  You couldn’t call them all addicts, though, considering only 9½ million used something other than marijuana. I’ll bet what Indonesia are calling addicts are mostly just users.

Even if we go with the Indonesian figure of 7.5% of their population, it’s interesting to note the US figure of past-month drug users is 8.3%, and that’s only 8.3% of the population aged 12 and over.  So even with a death penalty for drug trafficking, Indonesia has about the same rate of drug users as the United States.

This has been a very high-profile story “down under” in Australia. This young woman, Schapelle Corby, appears to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. While traveling through an Indonesian airport on her way to surf in Bali, she was nabbed with 4.1kg of marijuana in her body-board bag. Corby has no prior record, has never been known to have been involved with marijuana or other drugs, and insists there was nothing in her body-board bag when she left Australia. She hardly fits the profile of a high-stakes marijuana smuggler, and her defense theorizes that she was the victim of a ring of airport baggage handlers who surreptitiously slip their packages into baggage in Australia, then it is retrieved by airport baggage handlers in Indonesia, who apparently missed Corby’s delivery. Indonesia is renowned for its incredibly harsh drug laws and it looks like she’ll be spending the rest of her young adult years in prison:

Schapelle Corby’s clemency plea last hope | Herald Sun
INDONESIA’S Supreme Court has rejected Schapelle Corby’s final appeal against her 20-year sentence for drug trafficking.It was her last legal avenue to have her sentence overturned.

The only other avenue is a plea for clemency to Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, which requires an admission of guilt.

However, Mr Yudhoyono has previously said he opposes granting pardons for drugs crimes.

Corby’s lawyers also argued the sentence was too harsh compared with punishments handed down for similar offences elsewhere in Indonesia.