Do Not Pass Go

It's almost enough to get me to rethink retiring the "Rampant Idiocy" Label.

An American man is being held in Russia after airport security discovered cannabis-laced sweets in his luggage, according to Russian state media.

US man held in Russia for carrying cannabis sweets - state media

To be sure, I have no idea whether or not this unnamed traveler was actually carrying cannabis edibles with him when he landed at Vnukovo International Airport. If he was, that was unwise... someone should have told him that a note from one's doctor doesn't invalidate other nation's laws. But given that the current government of Russia appears to treat locking up American travelers as it newest hobby, why are people going there in the first place? Are Russian jails the hot new tourist destination? It's on a level with vacationing in Iran, at this point.

I'm dubious enough about Americans whose jobs require them to be in Russia being over there. Every time I see or hear a news report from an American journalist somewhere in Russia, I half expect the story to end in their detention. So I find the idea of traveling there for leisure to be almost completely nonsensical. And taking cannabis along for the trip?

Prisoner exchanges occurred as recently as this week, when a Russian national jailed in the US on money laundering charges was freed in exchange for American Marc Fogel, who was arrested for cannabis possession in 2021.

This whole thing smacks of a strain of "Ugly Americanism" that decides that it's not worth respecting, or even knowing, the laws of other places, even when there are active geopolitical tensions with those places, because those tensions aren't worth taking into account, either. Even if the traveler didn't actually have cannabis on him when he was stopped, the idea that this would somehow protect them seems laughable.

Some parts of the world are, for all intents and purposes, closed to American citizens. Russia is one of them. And while I'm sure that a lot of Americans, for whatever reason, are able to travel there without incident, that's not the same as traveling there without risk. And in this case, the risk is being detained, to be used as a bargaining chip for the return of people the Putin Administration finds valuable to itself. Of course, there are other risks; no journey comes with a guarantee of making it home in one piece, or when one expects to. But I'm not sure that's a good reason to tempt fate, in the face of fate actively demonstrating what it's capable of.