When a Vietnamese attendee at a town hall asked Pres. Obama about his weed-smoking past, the U.S. president replied that he “didn’t know” if reports of his marijuana use were true. And, after expounding on his personal turn-around, warned, “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.

Speaking to a group of young Vietnamese leaders in Ho Chi Minh city, Obama was hit with the accusation and asked to explain how and why he got his life together and went on to achieve greatness:

A Vietnamese mother who claimed she had been “trafficked” into the UK is facing deportation after she admitted helping to grow nearly 300 cannabis plants at a house in Halifax.

Ut Tran, who speaks no English, was living in the lounge of the rented house in Glen Terrace, Savile Park, and sleeping on a mattress in what a judge described as “very meagre circumstances” when police officers went to the property in April.

After forcing an entry into the house the police found three bedrooms and a cellar had been coverted into a sophisticated cannabis-growing operation with smaller plants being grown in the “nursery” in the cellar.

AN illegal immigrant paid $20,000 to human traffickers on the promise he would be given employment in the UK, only to be left to run a 245 cannabis plant facility.

Vietnamese national Dong Hoang, 41, handed his family savings to people smugglers and left his wife and two children behind, a court heard.

Hoang was told he would be given a job but instead had to look after the cannabis facility at a Blackwood house in isolation, his barrister Andrew Jones said.

Today, Newport Judge RA Britton sentenced him to nine months in prison after he pleaded guilty to producing cannabis.

Hoang is to be deported back to his country after serving half his sentence in custody, Newport Crown Court heard.

A Vietnam court has given a death sentence to a Filipino man for carrying over 3.4kg of cocaine from Brazil into Vietnam in late 2013.

Forty-year-old Emmanuel Sillo Camacho received the sentence at his trial opened by the Hanoi People’s Court on Tuesday on charges of “illegally transporting drugs” pursuant to Article 194 of the Penal Code.

Camacho was arrested in early December 2013 after being caught with cocaine hidden in his luggage at Noi Bai International Airport in Hanoi.

Security forces discovered white powder with total weight exceeding 3,408 grams stashed inside eighteen socks.

Camacho told investigators that four months before the arrest, he had met a woman named Jessica who was living in Brazil through Facebook.

“we were all partying the night before. We weren’t expecting any action because we were in a support unit. It was the only time I ever went into combat stoned. You get really alert when you are stoned because you have to be.”

Brno, July 20 (CTK) - Customs officers uncovered a Vietnamese gang dealing in marihuana in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany, seizing 45 kilogrammes of the drug in a raid held last Tuesday alone, Jiri Bartak, spokesman for the Czech Customs Administration, told journalists yesterday.
If convicted, the four main masterminds of the crime will face up to 18 years in prison, Bartak said.
The 45 kilogrammes of the drug were prepared for shipment abroad, he added.
In connection with the case, the fifth man is being prosecuted in Slovakia. The Czech Republic has asked for his extradition.
The customs officers uncovered three cannabis labs in Brno. Along with 45 kilogrammes of marihuana, worth roughly 4.5 million crowns, they also seized 420 cannabis plants.

Like many Vietnamese children, Hien was brought to Britain for a life of modern slavery. He ended up in prison on cannabis offences. We report on the gangs expanding across the UK and efforts to help their victims

Hien was 10 when he arrived in Britain. He did not know where he was or where he had been. He knew only that he was here to work. Since he emerged from the back of a lorry after crossing from Calais seven years ago, his experience has been one of exploitation and misery. He has been a domestic slave, been trafficked into cannabis factories, been abused and beaten and was eventually prosecuted and sent to prison. It has been a life of terror, isolation and pain.

Vietnam and Thailand convened their ninth bilateral conference on drug prevention and control cooperation in Hanoi on March 24, resolving to employ stronger measures to work towards creating a drug-free ASEAN region.

The Vietnamese side was led by Lieutenant General Do Kim Tuyen, deputy head of the Ministry of Public Security’s Police General Department for Crime Prevention and Control, while Secretary General of the Thai Office of the Narcotics Control Board Permpong Chaovalit headed the Thai delegation.

Australian citizen, Pham Trung Dung, has been sentenced to death by a court in Vietnam – a nation with one of the harshest drug laws in the world – for attempting to smuggle heroin out of the country. The sentence came just one day after Yury Fedotov, the executive director of the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), urged the Vietnamese government to further tackle “the manufacture, trafficking, and abuse” of certain drugs. The Southeast Asian state, a primary location on the route of the region’s drug traffickers, currently has more than 700 convicts awaiting execution, and has handed down the death penalty to over 30 drug smugglers in the past six months.

HANOI – For the young Vietnamese dope smokers rolling up outside a smart Hanoi cafe, local cannabis is just not good enough. As with their Adidas caps, iPhones and Sanskrit tattoos, so with their choice of bud: Only foreign will do.

Potent marijuana grown indoors in Canada and the United States is easy to buy in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, say regular smokers, and it sells for up to 10 times the price of locally grown weed. That is perhaps surprising given that marijuana is easy to cultivate regionally, and bringing drugs across continents is expensive and risky.