📸 Photo

CHANGE OF PLANS

It's very obvious, even to the untrained eye, when people are loaded up with drugs under their clothes. As soon as an official suspects something, or even if the police do a standard security pat down for weapons, they'll catch you straight away. If that happens, there's no way that you can deny the drugs are yours. What judge is going to believe that you don't know how ten bags of cocaine got taped around your body?

Swallowing the stuff, known as body packing, is still OK. All sorts of stories go around about the horrible death you die in the airport if one of the capsules bursts in your stomach or gets caught in your intestines, but if the job is done properly, then there's almost no chance of that happening. If you don't know how to do it yourself, there are people in the industry who specialise in compressing the cocaine into tight balls and wrapping them so that there's no way they will accidentally break open. The bigger operators even have special industrial machines that do the job perfectly — a hydraulic press that compacts the merchandise into a cylindrical mould and another machine to seal the product with several layers of the latest-technology plastics that aren't affected by stomach acid.

The optimal-size package for swallowing is ten grams. It's not a pleasant task, but you get used to it after a while. It can take several hours to get the whole lot done — the first few go down OK, but once your stomach starts to get full, it becomes more and more difficult. If you force yourself, then you want to vomit. The packets can be swallowed with water to make it easier, but that also fills your stomach up faster. The best thing to do is to prepare your body by eating lots of fibre in the days before. After swallowing the packets, you mustn't eat anything that might raise the acid levels in your digestive system or push the packets through too quickly.

Obviously, as with body strapping, if the police find merchandise inside your body there is no way to deny it's yours. But there is a lot less chance of the authorities finding it in the first place. The first check they do at an airport, if they suspect that you are body packing, is to press your stomach with their hands. They can usually feel any hard objects with their fingers, so it's best to swallow the packets two days before flying so that by the time you reach the terminal they are in your intestines, where they are more difficult to detect. The packets will still show up on an X-ray machine, or the police can detain you until your