Meth-filled bras are part of a long, weird tradition of creative drug smuggling
Australia’s big bust shows off traffickers’ cleverness
By Meagan Day
On Monday, Australian police confiscated 160 gallons of liquid methamphetamine from the gel inserts of bras. At over $700 million worth of meth, the bust was one of the biggest in Australian history.
Drug smugglers are inventive that way. You’ve heard about the dangerous practice of swallowing cocaine-filled balloons before boarding an airplane? It gets way sneakier and craftier than that.
In 2011, for instance, the U.S. Border Patrol detected some activity in the Arizona night — it was a catapult hurling pot over the border:
They confiscated the catapult, but a few years later traffickers were caught using a more powerful weed-launcher: a homemade compressed-air cannon. Smugglers have also used hard-to-detect motorized hang gliders, and a mangled drone skeleton, found in a Tijuana parking lot last year loaded with meth, suggests that drone use may also be on the rise.
In the 1990s, South American smugglers experimented with semi-submersibles. The first submarines were shoddy, but could pay off big-time. Soon the smugglers upgraded: the New York Times describes a new generation of narco-subs, equipped with air conditioning and satellite navigation, as “the envy of all but a few nations.” Here’s a six-ton haul found inside one 31-foot sub:
Meth-bras seem like an unprecedented departure from these highly coordinated efforts, until you consider the lengths to which smugglers go. Take the Venezuelan veterinarian who implanted heroin in a litter of puppies. Or the traffickers who slathered $10 million worth of marijuana with frozen guacamole. Then there’s the man who crossed into the US from Canada with 100 bottles of “holy water” full of ketamine, and the woman who hid marijuana in framed portraits of Jesus. Smugglers even snuck coloring books with opiate-saturated pages into a prison in New Jersey:
And these are just the traffickers who got caught. Drugs travel unseen across borders every day. They fly overhead, glide underwater, and pass checkpoints undetected inside innocuous-seeming luggage. Drugs arrive strapped to the chests of 92-year-old wheelchair-bound grandmas, and overflowing from duffel bags aboard teenage hippies’ surfboards. They have been disguised in Nintendo Wiis, Mr. Potato Heads, baby strollers and goat meat. Even in unconvincingly labeled bottles like these, which smugglers tried to pass off as “gay lube oil”:
Meth-filled bras are pretty tricky, but they’re nothing compared to one woman’s ingenuity — trafficking liquid cocaine in her breast implants. We’ll spare you an image of that drug bust.
