MUM Iris Baker is desperate to raise £25,000 to pay off a fine imposed on her son Nick for drugs trafficking in Japan.

Mr Baker, 32, was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment, as well as the hefty fine, after a Japanese court found him guilty of attempting to smuggle 40,000 ecstasy tablets out of the country.

Now Mrs Baker, 55, who believes her son is innocent, is appealing for ideas to help her raise the money because if her son fails to pay up, she said, he would be forced to endure another 500 days in solitary confinement.

And as punishment he will be forced to spend a week making bags, and the following week taking them apart again.

"It's a terrible thing to have to do it's like torture," she said. "The food they give him them wouldn't be enough to feed a three-year-old."

Mrs Baker is setting up a website soon and will make the address available for people who want to get in touch with ideas for fundraising.

She is also continuing her campaign for her son's release, writing to Prime Minister Tony Blair every week, in an effort to persuade him to press for Mr Baker to be freed.

She has also started a petition asking Mr Blair to request a fair trial for her son. And she wants the authorities in Japan to admit evidence waiting in Belgium, which she thinks will prove her son was duped into carry a case containing the drugs for someone else.

The man who gave Mr Baker the case to carry was, she said, later arrested in Belgium after another similar incident.

"I am not optimistic," she said. "Unless the British Government gets involved and Mr Blair starts caring about individuals I am afraid nothing will happen."

She said the whole situation had exhausted her. "I don't know how I will find the energy to keep on fighting," she said.

Mr Baker was kept in solitary confinement for 11 months, but now shares a cell with Japanese prisoners.

Mrs Baker, a financial controller, has received four letters from him since his sentence was passed and she said she feared for his state of mind.

Mr Baker's partner, from Stroud, is helping out with the campaign to free him. Neither she nor the couple's two-year-old son George have seen him for 14 months.