A teenaged girl from Sydney, Tina Phan, that was arrested at the Knockout Games of Destiny Music Festival in Australia for attempting to smuggle roughly four hundred ecstasy pills inside of her body into the event, pleaded guilty on Thursday for her involvment in the incident.
The event took place in early December of 2018, and has been under fire due to the one hundred and thirty people that needed medical attention following the event from consuming faulty chemicals, thirteen were hosiptilised, two of which were in critical condition and needed to be put in medically induced comas to survive, and one where a young man lost his life.
According to official court documents, while Phan was on her way to the event, she was propositioned by a friend to internally smuggle a condom full of ecstasy capsules into to event in exchange for money, she agreed. On her way into the event she was approached by security and a drug detection dog and was targeted as somebody that had drugs in their possession.
After she was tipped off by the drug dogs, she was then escorted to a designated searching area and complied to a search. During the search she was asked what drugs she was carrying on her, she told them that she was carrying what she believed to be capsules of MDMA, which she handed over to police immediately.
Once the condom filled with drugs was removed from the young woman, the police counted the contents, and claimed to find 394 capsules of MDMA, and she was detained for prosecution. Processing took about a month and the teen plead guilty without hesitation and showed remorse for her actions in front of the judge.
Phan has been a contributing member of her local society and also demonstrates characteristics of somebody with a bright future. She currently is in school with aspirations to become a nurse, and is also on the cross-country and oztag teams at her school, she also works at her local Subway to help give financial support to her family.
She stated to Magistrate Louise McManus that her mother was recently separated from her father after twenty-one years of marriage and that they had recently been experiencing financial hardship. When the opportunity presented itself for her to make the money by smuggling drugs at the festival that she felt as if it were something that she needed to do. She told the judge that she was ashamed by her actions and that she simply made a bad decision based off of hard times.
When Phan told McManus her story the judge said “dear me”, and began to tell the courts that she was not buying the story. She did not accept the fact that the aspiring nurse and sportswoman made the deliberate criminal act to help her family financially.
McManus went on to reprimand Phan in front of the courts and scolded her about her immature decision, and lectured her about the dangers of drug use, and the potential implications that could occur from it.
The courts sentenced Phan to a 12-month community correction order which included eighty hours of community service. In other parts of the world, sentencing could have been more severe, and the teen should feel lucky to get the simple slap on the wrist for her involvement in drug smuggling into the music festival.
