An Australian man is facing 20 years’ jail for dealing cocaine to holiday-makers on the resort island of Bali, police said Thursday.
Brendon Luke Johnson, from Brisbane on Australia’s east coast, was arrested Saturday with his Indonesian girlfriend at their rented unit in Kerobokan, an area that has become popular among expats.
Police said they found 13 packages of cocaine weighing 11.6 grammes stashed in his wallet and inside a box when they raided his home.
“His consumers are foreign tourists who came to Bali and needed drugs,” local police chief Hadi Purnomo told journalists.
The 43-year-old designer, who has been living in Bali for four years, said he sold the drugs to pay for his addiction, Purnomo said.
Johnson also claimed it helped him cope with stress and headaches, the police chief added.
Police arrested Johnson after receiving a tip off from locals that a 20-year-old Indonesian woman was using drugs nearby.
After being interrogated by police, she said she was helping Johnson’s girlfriend sell cocaine.
Indonesia has some of the world’s toughest anti-drug laws and drug traffickers can be sentenced to death for carrying more than five grammes of some drugs.
Several foreign and Indonesian nationals have been executed by firing squad in recent years for drug smugglers, including Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in 2015, two Bali Nine members arrested in 2005 for an attempt to smuggle heroin from Indonesia to Australia.
High-profile cases like that of Australian national Schapelle Corby, who spent more than nine years behind bars for smuggling marijuana into Bali, have stoked concern that Indonesia is becoming a drug destination.
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