Every year, airport authorities around the world seize hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal substances that criminals attempt to smuggle across borders.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has previously released descriptions of incidents in which it found drugs in everything from the inside of a hair scrunchy to the carcass of a raw chicken while just last week the Canadian police found a Breaking Bad-worthy quantity of methamphetamine (24.84 kilograms or 11.8 pounds) inside the suitcase of a traveler going from Vancouver to Australia.
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Another recent incident occurred at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (ATL) when the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized five pounds of a chemical substance called gamma butyrolactone in the suitcase of a 26-year-old traveler coming in from Spain.
"Seized two and a half quarts of liquid GBL and arrested the individual"
Colloquially known as both "liquid ecstasy" and "coma in a bottle," gamma butyrolactone is a form of chemical compound known to cause extreme sleepiness in those who take it. It is not prescribed as medicine but, in recent years, has been rising up as an illicit street drug due to its extreme potency and highly addictive nature.
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The individual was transporting the substance in liquid form spread across two bottles totaling approximately two and a half quarts.
“GHB can be used by sexual predators as a date-rape drug, and by bodybuilders to increase growth hormone,” CBP wrote in its summary of the seizure. “The officers seized the two and half quarts of liquid GBL and arrested the individual who was later turned over to Clayton County Police Department for state prosecution.”
The arrested individual was a U.S. citizen coming in from time spent abroad.
The CBP also said it seizes an average of 2,895 pounds of dangerous drugs at the country’s airports each day and uses a number of methods ranging from usual screening to trained dogs to locate it on smugglers.
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Here are some of the other items seized by the CBP
“Officers used a handheld elemental isotope analysis tool to determine what the clear liquid/substance was and identified it as GBL,” the CBP wrote further. “Under the Control Substance Act, GBL is a Schedule 1 chemical and known to cause symptoms such as sleepiness, drowsiness, memory loss, and confusion to mention a few.”
On top of drugs, customs authorities work to catch those smuggling a number of other forbidden items ranging from plant species that can spread disease to hidden luxury goods.
Last February, a traveler coming into Boston on a Delta Air Lines (DAL) flight from Paris’ Charles De Gaulle Airport (CDG) was found to have the mummified remains of four monkeys in his baggage. This type of product is used as food in some parts of Africa (the traveler had transferred from an earlier flight from the Democratic Republic of Congo) but was promptly seized and destroyed by CBP.
A few months earlier, CBP also seized 15 pounds of goat organs from two travelers passing through Chicago’s O'Hare International Airport (ORD) while another branch of the government agency concurrently found a box of giraffe feces on a traveler at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP).
