Drug Traffickers in Iran Swallow 1.8kg of Opium

“The three narco-traffickers were under police surveillance when they set off on a trip to one of the southern provinces,” said Colonel Hadi Qazvine’I, the drug enforcement chief of Iran’s Hamadan province.

“After reviewing the available information, police found out that the drug traffickers intended to take the narcotics to Malayer by swallowing them,” said the colonel, according to a Farsi report by Khabar Online.

“The smugglers wanted to distribute the drugs in Malayer, buy they were arrested by drug enforcement police Monday afternoon before they arrived in the city,” he said.

They were taken to hospital where x-rays were taken of their stomachs, he noted, adding that the results showed drugs in small packs inside.

“After the drugs were excreted from their bodies, it became clear that each one of them had swallowed around 600 grammes of opium,” he said.

The colonel noted that swallowing is one of the old and very dangerous methods of smuggling illicit drugs.

“As long as narcotics are inside the smugglers’ stomachs, they mustn’t eat or drink anything because eating and drinking will prompt peptic acid secretion, which wrecks the packaging of the drugs.”

“If the packaging of the narcotics inside the stomach is destroyed, the smuggler is sure to die if his/her stomach is not washed out by a doctor promptly,” said the top police official.

It is noteworthy that over three tonnes of narcotics have been seized in Hamadan in the past five months.