Skin Cream’s Latest Use: Smuggling Vehicle for Cocaine

We love a good skin cream here at Yahoo Beauty and thought we’d seen it all — lotions infused with bee venom, masks made of bird poop — but putting cocaine in your body lotion seems like one of those beauty ventures that, you know, since it’s highly illegal and dangerous, just isn’t worth it.

And that’s exactly what got one Ecuadorian woman arrested Monday after authorities at Thailand’s Suvarnabhumi Airport found her carrying a suitcase full of cocaine-laced body creams.

Narcotics police found six large jars of body lotion in the luggage of 56-year-old Jenny Pacheco after she stepped off her flight from Lima, Peru. Authorities said there was about 2.3 kg worth of cocaine in total, according to reports.

Narcotics officer Wutthipong Phetkamnerd told reporters that mixing cocaine in lotions and creams is “a new smuggling tactic to avoid arrest” but didn’t go into detail as to how the illicit drug could be extracted from the cream.

It turns out, infusing cocaine into beauty products is just the latest in a long line of increasingly creative ways to get contraband across international borders. That’s according to Gregory D. Lee, an expert witness in police procedures and retired DEA supervisory special agent. “As a smuggler, you’re only limited by your imagination and what you think you can pull off,” he tells Yahoo Beauty.

But what about getting it out (assuming, of course, that you don’t want cocaine-laced body lotion)? “It can be extracted through chemical means,” says Lee. “Whoever that woman was going to deliver the lotion to, obviously they were set up to do it.”

And while Lee says it was clever of Pacheco to allegedly stash the drugs in body cream, he adds that carrying six jars in her luggage was “a dead giveaway.” He estimates that she was carrying about $3,000 worth of cocaine and likely got her flight from South America to Asia covered.

Still, living in the shadow of the law comes with real risks, and Lee says that Thailand has some of the harshest punishments in the world — smugglers can face the death penalty.

Suffice it to say that as long as smugglers remain creative and brazen, they’ll keep trying to bring illegal drugs across borders, maybe next time in a lip kit.

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