Cop Math: How 132 Gummies Turn Into “Almost a Kilo” — and Maybe a Death Sentence

Indonesia hauled Jarred Shaw out of the arena and into a nightmare that looks like a bad episode of international Law & Order. What started as a man trying to manage his Crohn’s with edibles has been escalated into a full-blown, state-level propaganda display: police parading a U.S. basketball player, broadcasting the weight of candy like it’s a weapon, and filing charges that could land a man on death row.

This is not hyperbole. This is what happens when law, showmanship, and medieval drug statutes collide.

Here’s the math they used in court-adjacent theater: 132 cannabis gummies. Valued at roughly $400. Packed in a box. Cops weighed the whole thing — gelatin, sugar, packaging, sticker glue — and announced 869 grams of “evidence.” Suddenly, because of Indonesian statutory thresholds and a healthy dose of public spectacle, you’ve moved from “personal stash” to “major importation,” and the state starts talking life imprisonment or the death penalty. That’s Cop Math for you: put the packaging on the scale and watch a misdemeanor balloon into a capital crime.

Shaw’s story is painfully simple and unexceptional: the 35-year-old said he uses cannabis to treat Crohn’s disease and bought the gummies for personal use. He admits the move was stupid — you do not import edibles into a country whose motto on drugs seems to be “bring one gummy, earn a lifetime of paperwork.” But medicine-for-Crohn’s and “stupid” are not the same as “deserving execution.” Yet that’s the literal penalty on the table.

This is where Boof stops being cute and gets furious. The same molecule that funds dispensary window displays and local tax revenue in the U.S. can get an American man paraded on Indonesian TV as a would-be trafficker. That contrast is the strangest kind of violent hypocrisy.

The Public Theater of Arrest

Police didn’t just arrest Shaw. They staged him. In footage and official statements, they treat the weight of the seized package like a trophy: the more grams you can announce, the more righteous your crackdown looks. Indonesian authorities claim the gummies contained 869 grams of cannabinoids; Shaw says the number is inflated by candy mass and packaging. Meanwhile, his life is the variable everyone else is solving for.

He’s been in pre-trial detention for months, banned from the Indonesian Basketball League, and living under the kind of legal shadow most players get only in their worst nightmares. Friends are fundraising. Human-rights groups are nervously watching. The parallels to Brittney Griner’s case in Russia are ugly and useful: an American in a foreign country, criminalized for cannabis, made into a bargaining chip in a legal system that negotiates in life sentences and headlines.

Cop Math, Explained

Here’s the brutal mechanics:

• Authorities seize an incoming package. They weigh everything — gummies, wrapping, bags, the cardboard box, the sticker saying “From: Bangkok.”

• They present the total weight as “cannabinoids.” They may test a sample and, depending on lab methods and definitions, extrapolate THC content in ways that suit a trafficking narrative.

• Criminal statutes in Indonesia set thresholds: cross that gram line and you move into tiers that include life and death as options.

• Publicity follows: TV crews, press releases, and the full machinery of moral panic. Result: a single arrest reads like a national victory over a drug scourge.
  

That’s how 132 gummies become “almost a kilo” and how a medical user becomes a poster child for a death-penalty law. The law is the law; the theater is the choice.

Global Cannabis, Local Consequences

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just Shaw’s bad luck. It’s a geopolitical failing. The global patchwork of cannabis laws is a map of who gets punished and how. In the U.S., a company launches a “Sleep” gummy, investors clap, taxes get counted. In Jakarta, a man imports the same kind of gummy and faces an outcome worth a late-night foreign policy cable. The molecule didn’t change. The laws did. The stakes did.

Human rights groups note that Indonesia keeps hundreds of people on death row for drug crimes; the country has used execution and maintains extremely harsh penalties for importation or distribution above certain amounts. For travelers and expatriates, that means a tiny legal error can metastasize into a life-or-death crisis. For athletes, “I use cannabis for Crohn’s” translates into an explanation that carries no legal weight in that jurisdiction.

The Industry’s Moral Accounting

There’s another layer here that should make every executive at every dispensary in the U.S. uncomfortable.

The revenue language of the modern cannabis industry is intimately tied to normalization: lily-white marketing, medical narratives, wellness positioning. We sell the idea of “safe, regulated cannabis” and then act surprised when other jurisdictions take a harder line that includes capital punishment. That mismatch isn’t just ironic — it’s morally obscene.

If you sit in a corporate boardroom and model the growth of edibles as a tasty revenue line, you are implicitly exporting a product that, depending on borders and bureaucrats, can be used to hang someone. The product exists in a moral vacuum for some; for others, it’s lethal. That’s a company-level cognitive dissonance we need to name.

What Boof Calls For

We don’t do vapid calls for “education” — we demand the kind of clarity that changes outcomes:

• Media outlets and public officials need to stop treating weight as theater and start treating people as humans. Show restraint. Don’t amplify the staged “evidence” narrative.

• Sports leagues that operate internationally must acknowledge the risk they send players into and build meaningful legal support, not boilerplate contracts and vague PR. The IBL’s lifetime ban on Shaw? Sure — but also, where’s the consular help and urgent diplomacy?

• U.S. diplomats need to treat cannabis incarceration abroad with the urgency reserved for hostages. Because functionally, that’s what this is: an American citizen in legal peril over substances Americans increasingly accept domestically.
  

Closing — The Cost of Cop Math

Jarred Shaw’s case is a brutal case study in how laws, optics, and simple arithmetic can conspire to erase a person’s life for the weight of a candy box. He did something dumb in a country with zero tolerance for that kind of dumb. That does not make the country’s response proportional, humane, or just. It makes it cruel theater. We should be angry that the machinery of justice can be so easily turned into spectacle — and that spectacle can end a life.

If Boof has a role here, it’s this: document the math, call out the theater, and refuse to let an American be reduced to a gram figure in somebody else’s propaganda playbook. Because here’s the cold fact: cannabis doesn’t execute people. Laws do. And this country still believes, apparently, that chewing candy should sometimes be a capital offense.