I heard something quite clever today from someone else who had friends arrested. those guys filled up their ‘urine sample’ with some water, and a bit of tobacco diluted in it.
So, there you go, folks. If you get arrested in a club raid, remember, what they need has a yellowish tinge to it.
Well I’m going out tonight. I’m not taking anything because I don’t want the risk (and I wouldn’t do something illegal like that anyway of course), but if the police want to haul us down to the station when I’m celebrating New Year’s Eve, I’m going to kick up as much stink as I possibly can - refusal, calls to my ‘embassy’ whatever. I still can’t believe that the police do this. Like being out dancing is an illegal activity. What would happen if the police busted into a popular restaurant, or big hotel at noon one day and took EVERYONE there down to the station for ten hours to test their piss?
Taiwan might be pretty democratic these days, but it’s hardly free.
bri
So, does anybody know what can one do if something like this happens? Do we have the right to deny a urine sample or some kind of way to prevent this?
Yes. Don’t do drugs.
Galley Gong, caught in a club with a raid … told you’ll be taken down town for a piss sample, I say give the cop a piss sample right then and there.
Personally I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who was caught in this or other raids, and think it’s a bit rich that they should complain about it here. Unless they’re from very much the lower end of the intelligence scale, people should know that using/selling/importing/whatever drugs in Taiwan is treated as a pretty serious offence. Why not save it for Amsterdam or whatever, where it’s more acceptable. As far as I remember this raid took place at 10/11am, now forgive me if I’m accusing you in the wrong, put not many normal people are in a club at this time, unless they’re using. Bearing this in mind I think the cops had a very reasonable grounds for suspicion.
Sound words from a Puritan.
But [Black Ice] sounds like a drug handle to me.
Something like Vanilla Ice?
Ice Ice Baby.
Hey Luigi - my reckoning is the Black Ice is just out of rehab … hence the zeal of the convert emotional outbust against the recreational pharmaceuticals. I think we should be supportive of him - and buy all the knitting his therapy provides.
Mind you teaching a class of screaming kindies has driven the best of us to legal or illegal substances in the past.
quote[quote] Yes. Don't do drugs. [/quote]quote[quote] Personally I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who was caught in this or other raids, and think it's a bit rich that they should complain about it here. [/quote]Don’t be so stupid.
It’s not just people using drugs who get taken to the police station. Anyone who is there enjoying themselves, not doing anything illegal gets taken away for 10 hours or so of their day and shown on national TV.
How would you like it if you were having lunch in a restaurant or sitting in a cafe at midday and the police marched in and hauled everybody there off to the station?
Or perhaps you think danicng in nightclubs is some sort of immoral behaviour that should be punished?
Bri
Bri, the chances that the boys in blue would march into a normal restaurant at lunch time and drag everyone away on suspicion of narc usage would be next to none. If you’re at a dance club at 10 in the morning and not a druggie, then you’d be the only one including the staff.
There’s a big f-off sign at CKS airport when you come in about death penalties and drugs, perhaps some raid “victims” should have taken notice? I think they got off lightly…
Well, my young friend is still waiting around to hear something about his piss test, so who knows if they’ll do a darned thing. He has even gone abroad for the holidays and isn’t the least bit concerned at the moment. It’s been almost two months now. Will keep the board posted if I hear any news from him regarding this.
BTW, he told me one of the blokes who was hauled down to the station was completely clean. I don’t think one has to partake in drugs to enjoy a dance club, even at ten a.m.
Not my thing now, but I imagine ten years ago I may have been amongst the crowd, and ‘untainted’, as well. Therefore, I don’t believe that being in a club with your friends necessarily implicates you.
Hey, crazyabouttaiwan! Tell everyone what it feels like to be hauled into the cop shop with cameras whirring and even getting your mug shot on the front page of a Taiwan daily.
You certainly weren’t doing drugs and yet you were in with the zookeepers.
A friend of mine used to teach down at Shi-Ta, in their night program. He met a couple of male students who were, “involved in police work”. Some time later we bumped into these guys at 99. We sat down to a few rounds of beers and some very tedious conversation with these fellahs. It turns out they are “undecover” narco cops. They kept asking us to point out druggie types, and to give them ideas about where the scene is. One of the Taiwanese Serpicos even tried to make a score off of some foreigner while waiting in line to use the john.
The good news is that these guys stick out like sore thumbs. They were comical in their efforts to blend in and look hip.
The bad news is - they are definitely out there. Police piss raids aren’t the only danger.
Anyone who is partaking in drugs in Taipei needs to keep in mind that guys like the Two Stooges that I met frequent the obvious bars, and would very happily take a gringo in, as much as a local. It turns out that these two eager beavers were doing this in their free time in order to make busts that would advance their carrers.
Bottom line - avoid any local males that try to buy or sell you anything other that a cold beer or a gin and tonic, when you are out on the town.
The smart thing to do is to stick with people you trust, and never carry anything illicit out with you at night.
Sorry, but I’ve got to come down on the side of “Black Ice” on this one…what precisely is it that gives people the idea that they, as foreigners, can come into another country that is not their own and (sorry!) “piss” in the face of the law?
Would you be sympathetic of a foreigner in your country who did something against the law that your government takes seriously? You would probably say, “Good riddance! We don’t need people like that coming into our country and taking advantage of the system, etc. etc.” Takers…only here to make a buck…and so on.
I’d be interested to know how many of the long-time residents here are into the drug scene, as opposed to those who are more or less floating around the globe working a bit and drinking a lot.
But more than anything, the expectation that foreigners should receive special treatment in these cases seems to me rather absurd. It’s like when you get pulled over on your motorcycle. Anyone has the right to try to wiggle out of it, but if you really did turn right on red, and you know perfectly well that Taiwan has a law against it, then pay the fine and be a bit smarter the next time. IMHO being smarter doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding corners where the cops might be hanging around to write tickets, but more something like taking a more responsible attitude toward life.
Yes, you’re a foreigner. Yes, you can avail yourself of certain informal “privileges” that locals cannot (higher salaries, modeling jobs even for the rather portly, probability of getting off on traffic tickets if you offer an English class to the cop, etc.) but IMHO you shouldn’t expect to openly flaunt the law and think you will be let off while others are not. It’s probably not directly related, but I suspect that the idea many companies have that foreigners are unreliable stems somewhat from this perception created by a few (i.e., cell phone contracts, limitations on deposits/guarantors, and the like). If there’s no reasonable expectation that a foreigner will respect the law, and there’s no way to go after him/her because s/he leaves the country, then what are they to think??
OK, flame away! They don’t call me “ironlady” for nothing.
Terry
“Who Pissed in My Pot?”
Busting bars to me smacks of the busting of motorcyclists syndrome that Taiwanese cops seem to be so fond of.
Not to say that bikers don’t break laws or clubbers don’t take drugs but why are they always targeting the small fry. I’m yet to read about the great Taiwan drug bust. However, I have read an awful lot about Taiwan making the US DEA watch list for the transportation of hard drugs.
20 out of 300 that seems unbelievable to me. It certainly doesn’t warrant probable cause for a drug raid on a night club, but it definitely warrants probable cause for a corruption inquiry into the handling of urine samples. I vote it be called, “Who Pissed in My Pot?” Or am I just pissing into the wind on this one.
If 7% of your students were cheating on an exam, would that be important enough to do something?
I agree that one would like to see the authorities go after the “bigger fish”. But then again, it’s the small fish who partake of what the big fish have to offer. If there were suddenly no drug market, I’m sure the gangsters would come up on some hard times (at least until they figured out some other racket to replace the income with).
Or are people still growing their own, like this guy I knew years ago who used to mail himself marijuana seeds? “No, officer, I’m just an avid horticulturist. Poppies are my passion.”
Terry
It’s all just lazy police work, and Taiwan is not the only place it happens. The choice between raiding a nightclub full of pilled up dancers and raiding a pill factory full of armed gangsters is usually a no-brainer for police forces anywhere in the world.
Jesus, some of you just don’t get it. It’s not about whether taking drugs or breaking the law (you never cheat on taxes right?) is wrong. It’s about whether you can be able to go out dancing and not have to worry about being hauled off by the police and have to spend 10 hours being paraded in front of TV camerasand having your face on the front page of the paper for the crime of ‘being in a nightclub’.
Secondly, most of the people breaking the laws and taking drugs in this country are Taiwanese,not foreigners.
Thirdly, who said that it’s got anything to do with ‘foreign privileges’. I don’t want to put up with this shite because it’s a blatant infringement of basic human rights (there’s one for you Hartzell),not becuase I’m a foreigner. I get really pissed off when people tell me 'don’t expect special treatment just becuase you’re a foreigner, when I stand up for the kind of treatment ANYBODY should get.
Finally, your analogy with the red lights was right actually. On the roads police go after the easy busts so that they can look good (we caught XXXX dangerous drivers this month, so have made the roads safer) instead of tackling the real dangerous driving. In many countries turning right at a red light is allowed - it’s hardly very dangerous. Same with drugs. In most countries they try and catch the drug dealers, importers and producers, not the users. Catching the users isn’t going to stop the problem (and police in many countries have started to admit that it’s not really a problem anyway, drug users in clubs generally cause less problems than drinkers), it just makes them look like they’re doing something. Another example - we caught so many Tai Da students pirating CDs and busted Taizhong photocopy shops - yeah and at the same time you relaxed intellectual property laws.
And one more thought. If you think you should follow the laws just because they are the laws, what advice do you have for people living in countrieswhere the law forbids women to leave the house unaccompanied by a male relative, or bans gatherings of more than 10 people, or doesn’t allow you to practice your religion? I guess you disapprove of Gandhi and King then? They knowingly broke laws that they thought were wrong and encouraged others to do so.
Bri
I’ll quote my husband on this one (he’s a Latin American lawyer) when he always says something like “one has the obligation to stand up against unjust laws.”
I don’t happen to feel that a law against the use of drugs is unjust. I don’t happen to believe that there exists a basic human right to use illegal drugs (or whatever) in public places (don’t know if I make a distinction between those places and private places, but for the sake of argument here, we ARE talking about a public venue, right? I’d have to think more about the other question of use in one’s home, I guess.)
Every society has different levels of tolerance about what constitutes public harm or public nuisance and what things are to be tolerated. Obviously Taiwan tolerates a lot of behaviors that are considered harmful or offensive in the West (whether through a lack of codification or enforcement). Conversely, the West probably tolerates things that Chinese think quite awful.
Human rights, to me, means that every human has the same rights. So saying that women can’t do X because they are female would be a human rights violation. In this case, every human in Taiwan is forbidden from using a certain group of drugs, regardless of gender or national origin. There is no discrimination. Whether or not hauling 300 people down to the station for a little piss party is practical or effective is another question; however, if there really is a 7% rate of positives (assuming accurate testing, no sale of samples, etc. etc. ad nauseum) that seems to me to be a fairly good grounds for going through the exercise from the point of view of the police. It’s annoying to those taken in, and I suppose to the boss of the club, and it’s probably not really practical nor speedy, but I don’t see where it’s a violation of people’s basic rights.
It’s kinda like when I was 19 and in Mainland China for the first time. We kept looking up and seeing that red flag and we’d always catch ourselves saying something like “well, it’s a free country” and then stopping short realizing that it WASN’T. We foreigners often assume that the basic assumptions and values of life and society should be the ones we are accustomed to or support, and that’s normal – everyone has his own culture. But we have to draw the line somewhere on which items we “have the right” to try to change and which we should just keep quiet about. I would protest, for example, the regulation a few years back that required me (the only foreign professor at a certain university) to take a syphilis test as a condition for employment, but merely because I was the only one required to do so. If everyone had to do it, I would grumble but take it, especially since I would know there was absolutely no danger I wouldn’t pass it.
As for the statement that “more Taiwanese use drugs than foreigners” – well, there are more Taiwanese to choose from. I wonder, however, what the percentages might show. I’m a pretty straight arrow, as you might guess, but from my chats with various much more “interesting” types, I get the impression that there is a pretty lively and fairly widespread drug culture among foreigners in Taiwan. I wonder how many are long-term residents and how many “just passing through”, but might it be safe to say that there is a substantial percentage of foreigners within the borders of Taiwan who are using?
And besides doing this kind of raid, what other ways could the police potentially go after the drug users? They aren’t busting into foreigners’ houses or the houses of Taiwanese users; they’re monitoring behavior at a public venue, albeit using rather “broad axe big knife” methods.
I guess it basically comes down to whether you feel drug use should be legal or illegal, tolerated or controlled. I assume that if the police were somehow using the same procedure to control some other kind of behavior that you personally found to be offensive and/or dangerous to the public well-being (and please let’s not get into a long discussion about whether or not a little recreational drug use is either of these!) you would also object to this kind of behavior on the part of the police? Or would it be OK if you felt that it was benefitting you and/or the public?
I agree that it’s difficult to sit back and see the authorities crack down on one particular thing when we all know there are so many other problems out there, including the corruption among the authorities themselves.
What do you think?? Seems like an interesting thread, anyway!!
Terry
I don’t think this is a discussion about whether there is a right to break the law. Most “rights” under discussion are only discussed because they are prevented or the excercise of them is made difficult by law. It is more about the people tested / arrested who weren’t committing an offence, and whether they should have had their legal activities interrupted by a random stop and search procedure. Would it be acceptable for example to close the Spring Scream and test everyone on the basis that there may be drug offences being committed there ?
This sledgehammer approach has recently been used in the UK to make all pistols and handguns illegal despite the fact that many pistol shooting clubs had to close and very few legally held firearms are used in crime. (Handguns have been illegal in Northern Ireland for years - need I say more!?) However, that action was taken as a result of an Act of Parliament, and due process could be said to have been observed.
Was due process observed in the raids under discussion, and were the rights (if any) of the innocent dancers (if any!) observed ? Is there a presumption of innocence ? Is there any “due process” in Taiwan anyway ?