If binge-watching Breaking Bad, Narcos, and The Wire has taught us anything,
it’s that drug smugglers are an eccentric bunch. Considering the drug trade turns over
hundreds of billions of dollars a year and results in hundreds of thousands of deaths,
it’s bound to attract some huge weirdos with loony ideas and unscrupulous methods
for stacking cash and racking up bodies. But as is the case with most things, reality is
often far stranger than fiction. Here are some of the weirdest, most disturbing, and downright
craziest ways that real-life drug smugglers have tried to hide their illegal products!
Let’s start with the most basic - And even that’s both extremely dangerous and extremely
disgusting. You may think a drug smuggler needs a bunch of complicated and high-tech equipment
to ferry contraband across borders, but in a lot of cases, all they need is a condom
and an empty stomach. Practitioners of this method are known as Swallowers,
Internal Carriers, and Body Packers. They numb their throats to avoid discomfort,
then swallow as many as two hundred cocaine-filled condoms, each one carrying
around two to fifty grams. If this is making people with sensitive gag reflexes nervous,
don’t worry, Body Packers have been known to insert the drug capsules anally, too.
If the perpetrator makes it through customs without getting caught, they’ll take laxatives
to evacuate their extremely expensive cargo and then collect a paycheck. If things go badly,
radiographers at customs will catch out the would-be smugglers, and they’ll face
legal consequences. But there are far worse fates for Body Packers than an extended stay in jail.
There are 35 countries that still have the death penalty for drug smugglers on the books,
and some countries still very actively pursue these punishments,
such as Singapore and China. But you can still face a terrible fate from Body Packing before
you’re even caught. Occasionally, the capsules will break inside the Body Packer’s stomach,
spiking their system with a massive cocaine overdose. This is incredibly unpleasant,
according to one Barcelona emergency room doctor who’s dealt with a number of OD’ing Body Packers.
“A cocaine overdose can produce a psychotic episode and a nervous
state that ambulance personnel will try to treat with injectable Diazepam.
If the drugs have spread throughout the body, one of the common effects
is vasoconstriction—increased blood pressure caused by the constriction of blood vessels.
Heart attacks and vasoconstriction are the most common causes of death in those cases.
If we suspect that a patient has overdosed, we perform a barium x-ray. The barium also
has a laxative effect. If we discover that it's indeed a severe overdose,
we immediately have the drugs surgically removed from their system.”
Animal lovers may want to plug their ears for this
next one - Because human stomachs aren’t the only ones used for drug smuggling,
and sometimes the methods drug smugglers employ in this regard are outright monstrous.
One Colombian heroin outfit smuggled liquid heroin in the stomachs of puppies in 2005.
When the US Drug Enforcement Agency raided a farm operated by the cartel,
they were able to rescue ten purebred labrador puppies, six of which had already had their
stomachs cut open for the storage of 3 kilogram, or 6.6 pound, heroin packets.
While the puppies were rescued, not all of them survived the harrowing ordeal. Three of the six
who’d been infused with heroin packets died of infections after the drugs were removed.
Smuggling drugs inside literal puppies would feel like the work
of a silly cartoon supervillain if it wasn’t so gut-wrenchingly horrifying in real life.
But if that wasn’t unholy enough for you, what about one crazy drug smuggler who thought literal
holy water would be the best vector for his smuggling? This actually happened in 2008,
when customs caught Warren Maynard, a 50-year-old New York man, trying to
sneak dozens of bottles of Ketamine-laced water that he claimed was Holy Water. While he wasn’t
technically right in that regard, a bottle of water mixed with a powerful hallucinogen
certainly might make a person feel like they’re a little closer to the Almighty.
He wasn’t even the only smuggler to use religion as a shield for
his sinister activities. In March 2020, a Cincinnati Customs and Border Patrol
Team intercepted a collection of religious paintings that just so happened to contain
9.2 pounds of meth with a street value of $16,720. Is nothing sacred anymore?
And because subtlety is dead, Bernadino Garcia-Cordova, a drug trafficker also
known as The Spider, imported a statue of Jesus that was literally made from $30,000 worth of
cocaine. And this isn’t just a classy ornament for drug lords who also happen to be devout Catholics:
DEA Spokesperson Steven Robertson said that the statue could have been broken down with water,
sifted, and then strained to get the all too precious powder into street sale form.
It’s clear that if you want to be successful in this field of criminality, you’ve got to
use your head. But there are right and wrong ways to use your head - as two British women,
aged 17 and 20, found when they engaged in a harebrained scheme to smuggle $220,000 worth of
cocaine stitched into wigs. They were apparently paid only £4000 to be the mules in this scheme,
which probably wasn’t worth the risk, or the many, many years in prison they
were likely handed after being caught by the Jamaican authorities and sent back to the UK.
This seems to be a pretty embarrassing way to go down, but at least those two
anonymous British drug mules aren’t alone. In 2011, a 12-person drug ring was arrested
in Philadelphia for a more complex but still equally stupid scheme. They were
smuggling drugs out of Panama by sewing the drug packets into wigs and weaves before accepting the
packages in the US and passing the drugs over to street level dealers in not one, not two,
but three different states. Of all the flaws in their plan, a lack of ambition wasn’t one of them.
Sometimes, it isn’t the quantity of drugs smuggled that surprises you,
but the location. Fellas, we warn you - This one is going to make you squirm. Two different
men - Antoine Banks in 2011 and later Joshua Hare in 2016 - were both arrested for hiding
tiny drug packets under their foreskins. We here at the Infographics Show are not
entirely sure that any kind of payment would be worth going through that particular ordeal.
Let’s get away from that nightmare as soon as possible and, instead,
talk about horses. Don’t worry, equestrians, we’re not going to tell you anyone is cutting
open horses… Well, not yet, anyway. In this 2017 story of deranged drug distribution,
customs seized $1.2 million dollars of liquid meth that an enterprising
31-year-old woman had hidden in horse shampoo bottles. Do we think this is a good idea? Nay.
Was that too corny? Sorry, we’ll show ourselves out through the stable…
If all of this has left you feeling a little disturbed, please take a second to rest. How
about a snack? Maybe some sweet, delicious strawberry jam. Just make sure that the jam
didn’t come from this particular shipment of jam that was intercepted by Customs and Border Patrol
in Arizona back in 2016. A 51-year-old trucker was caught with 6,500 pounds of contraband marijuana,
valued at around $3.25 million, hidden inside vats of strawberry jam. Yummy!
Food products can be a common vector for drug smuggling. In January 2017,
a Southern border bust revealed huge quantities of cocaine hidden in cans
of tuna and corn. In Melbourne, Australian Customs agents found five tons of Ecstacy
hidden in tins disguised as canned tomatoes. But even the fruits and vegetables themselves
aren’t safe - The infamous Sinaloa Drug Cartel has been known to stuff plantains, cucumbers,
and coconuts with drugs. The same can be said of burritos, chilli peppers, fake carrots, soda cans,
candy, yams, and extremely unconvincing packs of limes - Which were actually just printed photos of
limes wrapped around large bricks of marijuana with a street value of half a million dollars.
Believe us, this is a lot more appealing than the Texas drug smugglers who hid
$459,000 worth of cocaine and marijuana in barrels of grease. Talk about slippery
customers! A similarly unappetizing smuggling scheme unfolded in Thailand,
where a popular variation of methamphetamine known as ya ba - translated literally to “Crazy
Drug” - has taken the scene by storm. One of the weirdest ways of smuggling ya ba has
been hiding it in the bodies of dead bugs. Though personally, we think ferrying around
shipments of dead bugs is pretty weird and suspicious in its own right, don’t you agree?
You’d think it’s too risky and obvious to smuggle drugs inside a car,
but professional drug smugglers still find bizarre and novel ways to do it. One bust in
early 2017 found a record-breaking $2 million worth of methamphetamines in packs under the
dashboard of a VW Jetta. A White Sedan also had $1.3 million of cocaine stashed in a
secret compartment hidden behind the license plate. And who could forget the pickup truck
that hid $800,000 of marijuana in another secret compartment beneath its flatbed?
And hey, just in case you were worried there was literally any part of a vehicle
that a drug smuggler couldn’t turn into a hiding place, a smuggler at the Presidio
Border hid half a million dollars in meth above the gas tank of a 1999 Mercedes-Benz.
And now we understand the true secret to being able to afford a Mercedes-Benz. Wow.
But not every drug smuggler about town is willing to settle for something that
mundane. Some drug lords truly want to live up to their Bond villain media image. One way
of doing that is by investing in a six-man drug smuggling submarine - or drugmarine, if you will.
The submarine, powered by diesel and seized in Ecuador in 2010,
was designed to carry over ten metric tons of drugs. And while it may have been intercepted
and caught in the end, nobody could deny that it’s incredibly theatrical.
But what if you want to go old school? We’re talking World War One old-school. In Colombia,
there have been documented cases of carrier pigeons being used to transport small pouches
of marijuana and crack, like sending wartime messages, but far more illegal.
What if you want to go even older school? This time, we’re talking
medieval old-school. Catapults and trebuchets are siege weapons used for taking down castles,
but drug cartels have found a new purpose for them - flinging marijuana buds across
the border so that they can start their own free-range weed farms in the US. It’s
forced Border agents to keep an eye on the land around the fence for any suspicious seedlings.
Some people don’t care for the classics, though, they want to keep it cutting edge. Such as one
anonymous drug smuggler who used a drone to smuggle 13 pounds of meth across the border
between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. Border Patrol intercepted the drone pretty easily
and arrested the smuggler, who would later be sentenced to 12 years in prison for his trouble.
Perhaps it’s better to stick to the classics and invest in a sturdy, reliable trebuchet instead.
It still somehow gets crazier from here, though!
You may remember such meme movies as the 2006 Samuel L. Jackson classic Snakes On A Plane and
the 2023 Elizabeth Banks classic Cocaine Bear. But what if their powers combined into Snakes On
A Plane On Cocaine? Except this isn’t a movie, it was a real incident that happened in 1993 when 80
pounds of cocaine was forced into the bellies of 223 live snakes by drug smugglers. Crazy antics
ensued - The snakes somehow escaped, causing chaos throughout the plane, until one quick-thinking cop
escorting an important witness to the stand was able to take control of the situation--
And scene. Snakes On A Plane On Cocaine coming to your local cinemas next fall.
Unfortunately the reality didn’t follow our little movie script, the snakes actually all
died from the trauma - Much like the bear that inspired Cocaine Bear. But to a drug smuggler,
sometimes a dead animal can be just as useful as a live one. A Mexico City drug cartel split
a ton of cocaine between twenty dead sharks, which they then tried to sneak into the United States.
Much like the dead bugs full of ya ba back in Thailand, we can’t help but wonder if hiding
cocaine in a bizarre shipment of twenty dead sharks might draw a little too much unwanted
attention to their secret cargo. But hey, we just make infotainment videos on YouTube,
who are we to tell El Chapo how to do his job? Just please don’t send any Sicarios our way, okay?
On the less ambitious side of things, in 2007,
some small-time New Zealand criminals tried to get drugs to their incarcerated friends by
shoving the drugs into dead birds and throwing them over the prison walls.
In 2001, a man named Richard Reid made going to the airport harder for all of
us when he tried and failed to detonate a bomb inside his shoe while on an airplane.
But it wasn’t just Mr. Reid’s fault, the TSA soon got another reason to check your
smelly sneakers. A man was busted at JFK Airport in New York for allegedly trying
to smuggle cocaine in his shoes - He had four pounds of cocaine hidden between six
pairs of shoes in his luggage. He was hoping to make $67,000 on this contraband, and instead,
all he got was federal narcotics charges from Homeland Security. High risk, no reward.
A Northern Spanish gang of drug traffickers took shoe-smuggled drugs to a whole new level - By also
throwing counterfeiting on top. They created high-quality knockoffs of Manolo Blahnik
stiletto shoes, held together with cocaine paste. Each pair of shoes sold for $75,000,
which, for those keeping track, is more than the previous guy at JFK
Airport stood to gain from all six of his life-ruining cocaine shoes.
In 2018, Portuguese airport security couldn’t help but notice an unusually caked-up Brazilian
man strolling through Lisbon International Airport. Nobody will ever know what was going
through their heads when they pulled the man aside and asked him to drop his trunks
and bare his buttocks, but in that moment, they undercovered a drug smuggler. He was
hiding a kilogram of cocaine inside a pair of fake butt cheeks. That’s a badonkadon’t.
But sometimes, smugglers go even further than that! Such as a Colombian woman arrested in
Germany in 2016, whom Customs noticed had fresh scars beneath her breasts.
This turned out to be because she was hiding a kilogram of cocaine
inside her breast implants. I guess you could say we saved the breast for last!
Now watch “What Happens To Your Body When Smoking Weed” or check
out “Devil’s Breath - World’s Scariest Drug?”