Drug mules: to strap or to swallow?

Schapelle Corby ain’t happy.

Her lead lawyer, Hotman Paris Hutapea, said yesterday that the Indonesian island's appeal court had notified him of the decision on Corby’s case, although he had not seen an official document.

"There is a verdict. They reduced her sentence by five years to 15 years," he said.
Mr Hutapea added that 15 years was "not too bad".

WTF! Not too bad?

And can you imagine what a “not too bad” verdict would be for the Bali nine? Probably a bullet in the head rather than a more gruesome method of execution!

What madness. It really beggars belief that young people from a rich country like Australia would put their lives on the line by acting as drug mules. In fact the risk of getting caught is so great that most mules prefer to swallow condoms filled with the drug rather than simply strap the drug onto the body like the Bali nine did. Later on the mules take laxatives to help them crap out the drugs.

So why didn’t the Bali nine swallow the drugs? Well, maybe they had read this story beforehand:

“You were one of a group of men involved in drug smuggling,” Lord Justice Hooper told Joseph Augustine in the Court of Criminal Appeal in London, “and you helped to set up a safe house in St Peter’s Street in Bedford. The purpose of this flat was to allow drug mules from the West Indies to hide out after travelling to Britain, until the drugs they had swallowed had passed through their system.

“In September 2003, you were looking after a drug mule, who had swallowed a kilogram of cocaine before leaving Trinidad. When the £50,000 payload you were expecting did not appear, you and your gang became impatient, and began force-feeding the smuggler with prune juice. You then resorted to what have been termed ‘extreme measures,’ such as inserting a broom handle and a carving knife into his anus, in an attempt to extract the drugs, although these attempts also failed.

“The man later escaped from the flat, and was found by neighbours, crawling in the street with various objects protruding from his anus. The cocaine was subsequently removed from his belly by surgeons in hospital. Police then raided the flat, and found what has been described as ‘a fully greased-up Hoover,’ with which you had tried to suck the drugs out of the mule’s bottom. They also found several electric toasters, which you have admitted were also part of the unsuccessful extraction process, although it remains unclear what use they would have been. You were subsequently convicted of smuggling cocaine at Luton Crown Court, and jailed for five years.

>Courtesy of Private Eye

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