A Romanian court has sentenced Wiz Khalifa to nine months in prison for smoking cannabis on stage.
The American rapper, real name Thomaz Cameron Jibril, admitted to smoking a joint during his performance at the Beach, Please! festival last year in Costinesti.
A Romanian appeals court overturned an earlier fine of 3,600 Romanian lei (£619; $829) for drug possession and ruled the rapper must serve the sentence in custody.
However he was sentenced in absentia. Earlier this week he was seen on stage performing with Gunna in California, and on Thursday he posted pictures and clips from his home on streaming platform Twitch and social media.
The BBC has approached the ten-time Grammy-nominated artist for comment.
Police briefly held and questioned Jibril after the concert on 13 July 2024, and prosecutors later charged him with possession of “risk drugs” for personal use.
Romanian investigators said he was in possession of more than 18 grams of cannabis and consumed an additional amount on stage.
In a written decision, the Constanța Court of Appeal judges said they overturned the original fine because the artist had sent “a message of normalisation of illegal conduct” and thereby encouraged “drug use among young people”.
Calling it an “ostentatious act”, the judges said the rapper was “a music performer, on the stage of a music festival well known among young people” who “possessed and consumed, in front of a large audience predominantly made up of very young people, an artisanal cigarette”.
Jabril said in a post on X a day after the incident that he did not mean to offend the country.
“They [the authorities] were very respectful and let me go. I’ll be back soon. But without a big ass joint next time.”
Romanian criminologist Vlad Zaha told BBC News that there was little-to-no chance of the US extraditing Jibril, and described the sentence as “unusually harsh”.
“Given the defendant’s wealth and connections, Romania’s lack of real negotiating power on extradition, and the legal and political status of cannabis in the US, it is highly unlikely that Wiz Khalifa will be sent to serve a prison sentence in Constanța, even though a formal judicial request will be submitted to the United States,” Mr Zaha said.
The artist, known for songs like Black and Yellow, See You Again and Young, Wild & Free, is often pictured smoking on his social media and founded his own marijuana brand in 2016.
Cannabis is legal recreational and medical use in some US states, but remains illegal under federal law.
Source: BBC
--Agencies
