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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UAE Dubai: Briton in the clear
7 Days
Tuesday 26 Feb 2008 A British youth worker who was jailed in Dubai for having a microscopic speck of cannabis on his shoe has been pardoned. Father-of-three Andrew Brown is now back home after his early release from a four-year prison term. Last September, immigration officials seized the 43-year-old at Dubai Airport as he waited for a connecting flight to the UK. They searched his suitcases and found cannabis weighing 0.003g - less than a grain of sugar - on the sole of his shoe. The Rastafarian, from Birmingham, said: “I was returning from a holiday in Ethiopia to mark the Rastafarian millennium when everything went very wrong. “I was waiting in the lounge in Dubai for our connection back to England when an immigration official came up to me and asked to search me for drugs. I was stripped and searched. “Then they started going through my luggage. One said they had found a tiny bit of cigarette paper on my shoes and that was it.” It is understood officials found cannabis on the paper. Brown added: “Before I knew it I’d been processed in a detention centre and sentenced to four years in prison. I had to face the fact I could be spending the next four years there, so I got my head down… but I felt utterly depressed. I felt completely hopeless.” Brown thought his fate was sealed after the British Embassy said they could not help him, but last week he was pardoned and allowed to return home. Brown said: “One moment I was going about my prison life as usual and the next I was on a plane back to Heathrow.” The mandatory sentence for anyone caught with drugs in Dubai is four years in jail. http://www.7days.ae/en/2008/02/26/briton-in-the-clear.html
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