Wigs, sweets and fake melons: Drug smugglers’ bizarre tricks to cross borders

Drugs are big business in Britain. While the global market is hard to gauge – its value is somewhere in the hundreds of billions – in the UK, the trade is estimated to be worth more than £9billion each year. But a record £3billion of illegal drugs were seized by Border Force in the 12 months to March last year, a rise of 52% from the previous year.

If caught, smugglers could see their profits vanish, along with the years of their life spent behind bars. With stakes so high, they are constantly looking for new and increasingly bizarre methods of evading detection. Just last week a man tried to fly from Colombia to Amsterdam with 220g of cocaine beneath his wig.

Its estimated value was at least £8,000 – although, if cut and sold for £100 a gram, it could be worth £22,000. That’s one expensive toupée. Late last year, five people were jailed for a century for a botched attempt to smuggle £200million of cocaine in a shipment of bananas from Colombia to Portsmouth harbour.

Border Force agents swapped the drugs for more real bananas and themselves delivered the lorry to a bogus grocery warehouse in Enfield, London. There, armed police burst in and arrested four of the gang. They also found the key to an Islington flat where the gang had been storing a 33kg block of cocaine from a previous shipment.

Its street value was at least £2million. Burying them under fruit was brazen, for sure, but perhaps not as bold as the smugglers who wrapped £4million of meth in plastic, painted two shades of green to resemble the watermelons they were hidden among.

The 300kg haul, contained in 1,220 packages, were detected by US customs officials while it was being transported by truck from Mexico last August. Fruit and vegetables are certainly a popular decoy for drug smugglers. Only a week before, officials stopped a 300kg shipment of meth hidden among celery at the very same Otay Mesa border crossing.

Another trend in drug smuggling is dressing them up as sweets. You may be familiar with cannabis gummies – a trick or treating seven-year-old boy was handed a pack of seemingly American ‘Cannaburst’ in Durham last Halloween – but there are some deadly ones out there too.

A homeless charity in New Zealand distributed sweets in fruity wrappers which, unknown to them, contained a potentially lethal dose of methamphetamine last summer. The supposed sweets – worth £472 each – had been in a retail-sized bag donated to Auckland City Mission by a member of the public,.

After three people – including a young boy and a member of staff – were hospitalised by consuming them, testing revealed them to be solid blocks of drugs believed to be 300 times stronger than a typical dose. Recovering addicts were among the people they had been distributed to in food parcels from the charity’s foodbank.

‘To say that we are devastated is an understatement,’ City Missioner Helen Robinson said. Police, who recovered 16 of the sweets, believed it was an importation scheme gone wrong. It’s unclear exactly what share of illicit drug imports make it across Britain’s borders, but police and customs officials have several means of detecting them..

X-rays and sniffer dogs may pick them up in packages arriving in ports and on airplanes, while intelligence may expose plans before products arrive. Commenting on the record number of drugs seized on entry to the UK last year, Minister for Migration and Citizenship Seema Malhotra said: ‘We are clear in our determination to protect the public from illegal drugs which pose a threat to people’s lives.

‘I’d like to thank our dedicated Border Force officers who work tirelessly to seize illegal drugs, alongside our police forces and NCA, who keep them off our streets and the public safe. ‘These statistics send a clear message to organised criminal gangs that they will be caught and face the full force of the law if they try to smuggle drugs into our country.’.

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