Drug Courier Profiles

Drug Couriers: The Reality

The press has characterized drug traffickers as ruthless, violent, corrupt, and wealthy. Recent research on imprisoned couriers from Europe, Latin America, and the United States has challenged the validity of these stereotypes and highlighted the ineffectiveness of the current efforts to stop importation and distribution of illegal drugs. The research showed that the most pronounced difference between high- and low-level drug traffickers is not in the quantity of drugs imported, but rather, in the personal characteristics of the low-level players, who are disproportionately poor, female, and of foreign nationality.

A British study showed that from 1985 through 1994, approximately 20 percent of female prisoners were drug importers, and that from 1995 through 2000, this percentage rose steeply. In contrast to the data regarding female prisoners, drug importers represented 4 percent of the British male prison population during the 1985 through 1994 period. Another British study found that during the 1990s, almost three-quarters of a sample of 900 imprisoned drug couriers were foreign nationals. Research in the United States, Europe, and Australia for the same time period showed that a similar, disproportionately large, percentage of imprisoned drug couriers were foreign nationals. Because of the paucity of repatriation treaties between most drug demand countries and drug supply or transit countries, foreign nationals convicted of being drug couriers tend to serve long prison sentences, thousands of miles from their families and friends, without resolution of the problems that led to the criminal behavior.

Writers of realistic fiction have followed the example of journalists, who have frequently used creative interpretation of facts in order to characterize greed as the motivation for most drug couriers. In fact, drug couriers are consistently shown to be motivated by a generalized experience of economic hardship or deprivation of basic necessities or by a very specific, immediate, personally and morally justifiable economic need, such as medical treatment for a sick child or elderly relative or repayments to loan sharks. There is also evidence that a significant minority of drug couriers engage in this illegal activity only under duress.

Fees paid to couriers are relatively small when [Page 554]compared to the inherently high-risk nature of this business. Drug couriers commonly use one of these methods to hide drug packets from law enforcement officers: (1) secreting packets of drugs in concealed luggage compartments, (2) strapping drug packets to several different body parts, and (3) swallowing a large numbers of small, drug-filled condoms or packets. In the third situation, the drug courier risks not only personal liberty but also, if one of the swallowed packages ruptures, the release of a severely detrimental and potentially lethal dose of a dangerous drug directly into the bloodstream. Research at various sites throughout the world has reinforced the concept of the drug courier as a generally nonviolent individual, who has had no previous criminal convictions, no evidence of drug use prior to accepting the courier's job, and no general knowledge of the value and nature of the substances he or she has smuggled. For example, many Nigerian couriers, interviewed in British prisons throughout the 1990s, reported that they believed they were not smuggling drugs, but were instead carrying gemstones, foreign currency, or some other form of contraband. Drug couriers are basically unskilled, uneducated, and living at or below the poverty level. Yet because of their visibility, they are the weakest link—the class of employees most likely to be arrested. From the perspective of an individual managing the illegal drug enterprise, it is vitally important to minimize risk to their operations by giving the courier absolutely minimal information about the organizations and individuals who orchestrate the drug trade. If the courier is then apprehended and detained by law enforcement officers, (1) the courier will be unable to reveal damaging facts about the drug selling business, because the business will not have given the courier this information, and (2) it will be more cost efficient for the traffickers to hire another courier, from the huge pool of impoverished, desperate, and reckless individuals, than to pay for legal defense of the arrested person.

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