NEW YORK: A 26-year-old American woman has been jailed on drug smuggling charges in Japan after her mother mailed her a three-month refill of her Adderall prescription, her family says.
Carrie Russell, a graduate from Western Oregon University, was reportedly diagnosed with attention deficit disorder at age 7. She is now jailed outside of Nagoya after her friends witnessed five plain-clothed police officers arrest her Feb. 20 at a restaurant in Tokyo, nearly 300 miles away, the Oregonian reported.
Her adoptive parents, John and Jill Russell, learned of the arrest the next day from their daughter’s friends. It took U.S. diplomats 24 hours to locate her, because the National Police Agency hadn’t notified the embassy of her arrest, a step typically taken when Japanese police detain an American, the Oregonian reported.
“We’re left in a state of disbelief,” Mr. Russell told the paper. “We would never imagine something like this to assault us from a civilized country like Japan.”
Jill Russell, a Hillsboro physician, said she had shipped the Adderall refill to her daughter, who lived in South Korea at the time. Her daughter then shipped the medication to Nagoya, where she planned to teach English in the coming weeks, the Oregonian reported.
