TOKYO: Japanese police has arrested an American woman who remains in a Japanese jail for shipping medication prescribed for her attention-deficit disorder to Japan, where she traveled to teach.
Carrie Russell, 26, was arrested in a Tokyo restaurant Feb. 20 and jailed for drug smuggling, after her mother, an Oregon physician, mailed a three-month supply of the medication Adderall to South Korea, where her daughter was living. The arrest was made when Russell shipped the medication to Nagoya, Japan, where she was about to begin a teaching career. Russell, adopted at infancy from a Guatemalan birth mother, was taken to a women’s detention center outside Nagoya, 275 miles from Tokyo, and the U.S. Embassy was not notified of the arrest by Japan’s National Police agency, the typical procedure for an arrested American citizen, The Oregonian newspaper reported.
“Nobody can bring any medicine containing methamphetamine or amphetamine (Adderall and so on) into Japan,” says a document on the Consulate General of Japan in Seattle. “If you are found with any medicine containing methamphetamine or amphetamine illegally in Japan, you can be arrested as a criminal on the spot, immediately, without a warrant.” Her mother, Jill Russell, said she prescribed Adderall when her daughter was 7, and regularly mailed the medication to South Korea without incident. She said the Adderall was sent in a used Tylenol bottle, instead of its prescription bottle, to fool potential thieves. “My repackaging was not an attempt to break or circumvent the law. It was intended to preserve Carrie’s privacy and dignity around a sensitive issue,” Jill Russell said in a sworn affidavit to Japanese police.
