PRISON OFFICER TO STAND TRIAL ON DRUGS CHARGES

A prison officer was found with three packages of cannabis in his uniform
jacket as he was about to drive to work at Paparua jail, the Christchurch
District Court has been told.

Before Wayne Forsyth's arrest on July 12, random drug tests on the wing
where he worked had shown that more than half of the inmates had consumed
cannabis -- well over twice the average rate for the Canterbury region, and
including inmates who had no contact with visitors.

Since Forsyth was suspended after the discovery by the police of 118g of
high-quality cannabis in his prison officer's jacket and another 23g in his
home, the rate of positive tests in the wing had gone down even though the
rate in the region over all had increased, the court was told.

Prison manager Paul Calvin Rushton said the cannabis found in Forsyth's
jacket was in three highly-compacted rolls of a kind which are used in jail
because they could be carried anally to avoid detection. "I had checks made
from the drug-test register, which indicated that more than half of the
drug tests (between January 1 and June 30 this year) in the east wing of
Paparua came back positive."

Forsyth worked in the east wing during that time. By comparison, the rate
of positive tests for inmates in Paparua's middle wing was less than one
quarter, he said.

He described as alarming the increase in cannabis use in the east wing,
particularly when it included inmates who did not have any contact with
visitors. He accepted, however, that the wing included more intractable
drug users than other wings and that a drug distribution network probably
existed on the wing.

Since Forsyth's arrest, the rate of positive tests among Canterbury inmates
had increased from 16 per cent to 22 per cent, but the rate on the east
wing had decreased, Mr Rushton said.

Forsyth was also allegedly found with a letter from an inmate to a friend,
in apparent breach of regulations that all letters had to be vetted by
prison supervisors, he said. Forsyth also had a copy of the jail's record
of how much money each inmate had in his prison-administered bank account,
which he should not have had.

Tony Greig, defending, accepted there was sufficient evidence to put
Forsyth, 43, on trial on a charge of possession of cannabis for sale or
supply. Justices of the Peace Merelyn Redstone and Margaret McKay remanded
him on bail to a pre-trial conference in the district court in December.