Police in Bali say they took an Australian drug suspect off his medication to check claims that he is mentally ill.
This is the same Aussie whose lawyer said last month that she fears he could die in jail without his medication.
Joshua James Baker was arrested in Bali on Oct. 8 at Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport, when 28 grams of marijuana mixed with tobacco and 37 pills of the sedative Diazepam (originally known as Valium) were allegedly discovered in his luggage.
He has since been declared a suspect on drug possession charges, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years.
The 32-year-old made a getaway from the toilet when he was doing a routine urine test on Oct. 9, climbing through a ventilation shaft. But his escape was brief — police tracked him down just 10 hours later in Canggu.
Baker has been in custody since then and his lawyer, Pande Putu Maya Arsanti has been pushing hard to get him released on grounds of mental illness.
“Police have tried to stop his medication so that they know the reaction,” Arsanti said, as quoted by News Corp Australia.
Police moved Baker over to Denpasar’s Sanglah Hospital this past weekend to take the Aussie off his meds and evaluate his reaction to test his mental illness—a move that Arsanti says she was not informed about.
“Police didn’t tell me when they took Joshua to Sanglah hospital. I just got the information from someone,” she said.
The monitoring period is two weeks, says Arsanti.
During police interrogation, Baker previously said that he had obtained the diazepam in Cambodia, where he had formerly lived with his Russian girlfriend.
Baker claims to have gotten the diazepam from a doctor in Cambodia, but couldn’t remember the name. Possible, but worth pointing out that Cambodian drug stores are notorious for not requiring prescriptions, and medications such as diazepam that require a prescription elsewhere are easily attainable over the counter.
He additionally said he was unaware that the tobacco he had brought to Bali had been mixed with marijuana.
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