Students jailed for a year after smoking pot while abroad

Two students studying in Australia have been jailed for a year after returning to Singapore with faint traces of drugs still in their blood three weeks after smoking cannabis at an end-of-exams party.

Film student Gavin Seow Lek Chen, 28, and his fiancee, Lynn Cheok Lye Peng, 22, a communications student, arrived home from Perth for their end-of-term break.

It was only when they later tried returning from a two-day break to Malacca in neighbouring Malaysia with Cheok's parents that they were stopped for a random urine test at a checkpoint.

They may have thought that since they took the drugs in Australia they had not breached Singapore's tough anti-drug laws.

But the island-state's Misuse of Drugs Act was changed last year after Chief Justice Yong Pung How upheld a 12-month jail term for Ecstasy consumption abroad in 1997.

Seow and Cheok are believed to be the first Singaporeans to be convicted under the altered law.