According to today’s Independent, legendary DJ and UK DnB institution Grooverider is looking at 4 years prison time for bringing 10 squid worth of weed into Dubai.

The DJ was arrested at Dubai airport on 23 November last year with 2.16g of cannabis in his pocket, which has a street value of about £10, three hours before he was due to play an hour-long set at a show in The Lodge, a nightclub. In court he claimed: “I forgot I had them in my trousers.”

Just for the record it should be said that the UAE is a sovereign nation, it makes laws as it sees fit, and obviously Grooverider broke the law and is being held accountable according to the UAE system.

But there is harsh-but-fair and then there is simply harsh, and, as someone who knows exactly how easy it is to make a mistake like his, I can’t help but be freaked out by paragraphs like this:

He is the latest in a long list of Western tourists whose legal indiscretions, whether born of ignorance or not, have led to severe punishment. Earlier this month, Keith Brown, a 43-year-old youth worker from the West Midlands, was jailed for four years after customs officials who stopped him on his way through Dubai airport found a speck of cannabis weighing 0.003g – invisible to the naked eye and lighter than a grain of sugar – on the bottom of his shoe.

In the timeless words of MC Evil B, “Oh my gosh!”

Now, I’ve got good friends working in Dubai right now. Some of them are Dutch. And this shit worries me.

But at least Grooverider has some star power. It’s not unheard of for these sentences to be rescinded if the right kind of diplomatic pressure is applied. Last year American producer Dallas Austin was pardoned and set free after being sentenced to his own 4-year bid for cocaine possession. A group of high power people that included, according to MTV

A conservative Republican senator/songwriter, an ’80s R&B singer who is inexplicably massive in the Middle East, a real-estate mogul, several ambassadors from around the globe and a Grammy-winning producer who is best known for moving musical mountains — not political ones

came together and got him sprung. So it IS doable. We just need similar movements across the water. David Miliband, get on your job.

Anyway, love to Grooverider. I saw him live a few times and he always killed it. Let’s celebrate that and hope all this garbage can be resolved, so he can get back to doing what he does best.

Here’s a live set from the Drum & Bass Arena anniversary show last year.

DOWNLOAD

Grooverider on myspace
Fabio & Grooverider on Radio 1

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