Hash by Clarkson Wensley

Author:Clarkson, Wensley [Clarkson, Wensley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

JANE THE MULE

Besides the barons, dealers and smugglers who’ve made fortunes from hash down the years, there is a small army of ‘part-timers’ – people who dip in and out of the secret underworld of hash and often pay the ultimate price for their involvement. These are the Mules – the characters who often risk their own health in a desperate bid to make a few thousand pounds, if they’re lucky.

Wherever there is plentiful, cheap hash there are mules prepared to risk their lives and liberty to carry it. Every year dozens of people are either arrested or die after swallowing balls of hash tightly packed in plastic.

These so-called ‘eggs’ usually hold about five grams of hash apiece. And most mules are expected to swallow around fifty of them at a time. Many are forced into it by human traffickers and other criminals. Others are students hoping to make some extra money by reselling the product once they get home. There are even a handful of hardened drug smugglers who seem willing to take the risks.

In 2012, one such mule called Edward Myatt, 54, from Ballarat, in Victoria, Australia, was stopped as he arrived at Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport on a flight from India after he aroused the suspicions of customs officers. He was later found to have swallowed more than seventy plastic casings containing 1.1kg of hashish and four grams of methamphetamine, otherwise known as ice.

Myatt was told after his arrest that he faced the possibility of a death sentence under Indonesia’s harsh narcotics laws. He was lucky. In the end he only got eight years and a 1.5 billion rupiah fine.

So when I met someone who knew a British woman who’d worked as a mule, I reckoned her experiences would offer a completely different angle on the secret underworld of hash.

*

The first time British nurse Jane worked as a mule was when she was a penniless eighteen-year-old student in Tangier without enough money to get home to Birmingham. She swallowed thirty pellets of hash in exchange for £1,000 and made it back to the UK to deliver the hash, despite one of the pellets bursting in her stomach.

Now in her mid-thirties, Jane has revived her career as a mule in a desperate bid to support her family. Since 2010, Jane has returned three times to her Moroccan lover in Tangier to swallow hash pellets. She says: ‘I can’t fully explain why I let myself be sucked back into all this but I guess it’s down to a combination of things. My husband lost his job. My salary as a nurse simply doesn’t cover the costs of bringing up my family and, if I am to be completely honest about it, I liked escaping the drudgery of my life and meeting my lover to do something exciting.’

Jane’s story is both harrowing and fascinating as she unravels her involvement in the most dangerous side of the hash industry of all.

‘I first went to Morocco as a student in the late nineties.

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