Immigration police have arrested an American man on Koh Phangan with cocaine, ketamine, ecstasy and other drugs worth about 13 million baht, most of it hidden in a compartment built into a sofa armrest.
Officers from Surat Thani immigration stopped Jared Dominic, a 34 year old who goes by the alias Dom, on Hat Yao Road at 4.10pm on Wednesday, October 21, with drugs in his socks.
They then searched his house, where he sat down on a sofa and would not get up. Officers took the sofa apart and found the compartment.
The haul came to 1.6 kilogrammes of cocaine, 1.4 kilogrammes of ketamine crystal, 340 ketamine pills, 2,540 ecstasy tablets, 349 grammes of MDMA and 72 grammes of 4-MMC.
4-MMC, sold as mephedrone or meow meow, is newer to the island than the rest of that list, and police describe it as spreading among foreign visitors.
Also seized were packaging equipment, digital scales, a phone and financial records. The phone carried advertisements listing the drugs, their prices and discounts for larger orders.
Police said he had lived on Koh Phangan for about seven years, started using in 2023 and moved into selling, supplying foreign tourists and the island’s parties in particular.
The case came out of the arrests of a Brazilian and an Israeli dealer in May. Following the money from those arrests led officers to him, and they watched him until Tuesday.
He faces charges of selling and possessing drugs for sale without permission, and of using cocaine, and was handed to investigators at Koh Phangan police station.
Foreign dealers on the island reach the courts regularly. A Chinese man was arrested in November 2025 for selling at Koh Phangan parties, and a Nigerian the previous March with 240,000 baht of cocaine.
Officers are still tracing where the drugs came from and who else was involved, and said they had ruled out neither a Thai source nor a smuggled one. Nobody else has been arrested.
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