An Israeli national has been reported dead at the Tokyo Airport as the result of an overdose after authorities said he tried to smuggle over a kilogram of cocaine and other stimulants in his stomach.

According to an article in the Mainichi, a national daily newspaper in Japan, authorities with the Metropolitan Police Department filed charges with public prosecutors Wednesday, accusing a suspect in his 50’s, who was not named in the article, of violating the Stimulants Control Act by swallowing multiple wraps of illegal stimulants and getting on a flight from France to Japan with the intent of bringing the drugs into the country for distribution and sale. 

The Mainichi said the deceased man collapsed inside the plane on January 2 as it arrived at the Tokyo Haneda Airport From France. He was taken to a hospital where he was later pronounced dead. 

The suspect reportedly had 89 individual packets or wraps of cocaine and other stimulants. Medical staff told the Mainichi that none of the wraps burst, so it was unclear how the suspect succumbed to drug poisoning, but authorities with the Metropolitan Police Department’s narcotics and firearms control division surmised the drugs must have seeped out of the wraps somehow. 

The process of smuggling drugs this way is referred to as “body packing.” A study on this practice by the National Institute of Health defined body packing as “the way of psychoactive substances smuggling by swallowing of carefully prepared packages with drugs into the gastrointestinal tract or by insertion them into the vagina or the rectum, especially in order to avoid finding them by the custom service.”

During the study, researchers administered 60 wraps of cocaine totalling 500 grams to an otherwise healthy 29-year-old Polish male to monitor and observe how his body would react to the introduction of so many foreign objects.

“During the 37-hours stay in our department the patient was monitored (blood pressure, heart rate, temperature), laxatives and oral fluids were administered. All the packages were evacuated through the natural way and it was followed up by the control abdominal radiography. No symptoms of acute cocaine intoxication or any other complications were observed,” the study said.

Now you might be wondering, as I was while writing this, how exactly a person might go about smuggling drugs inside their body without ending up dead, as this man did. Well, some light internet digging netted me a few answers.

A Vice profile on a Dutch cocaine smuggler illustrated how easy some believe this process to be. The girl, who was given the moniker Sharon, told Vice she began smuggling drugs from the small Caribbean island of Curacao to the Netherlands because of how common and easy it was in the area.

“A lot of people would ask you to smuggle for them if they knew you were Dutch. But I always told them that I wouldn’t. Well, until I ran into a friend I knew from back home,” Sharon said to Vice. “She asked me if I would smuggle some stuff for her and I decided to do it. Everybody did it back then. Every flight would have at least ten or 20 people with drugs on it. Even little old grandmas were selling drugs in Curacao.”

Packing the drugs is very important, as evidenced by the case at the Tokyo Airport, because if the packaging breaks it can cause overdose and death extremely quickly. Sharon told Vice that in her case, the cocaine was packed in plastic, wrapped in a latex glove then taped shut with a particular kind of packaging tape. Afterwards, additional layers of plastic and latex were added. 

“It was really well packaged,” Sharon told Vice. “Some people had a hard time getting it down, though. They’d practice with a piece of carrot or something like that.” 

Sharon also attested that she had a friend die at the age of 19 from a packaging burst. The kicker is Sharon was under the impression that she never took this risk, because she only ever swallowed boiled cocaine. I was unable to confirm if there was any accuracy to this information. 

 “That was pure coke, though. I only swallowed boiled coke, which won’t kill you. Or, at least, that’s what they told me,” Sharon said to Vice. “I’ve seen a lot of drug mules get dropped off at A&E [the emergency room], actually.”

The test for whether packaging would hold up on its journey from esophagus to toilet bowl was simple, according to Sharon. She would simply drop it into a cup of water and if it sank to the bottom, it required repackaging. If it floated, down the hatch.

“It’s not that complicated,” Sharon told Vice.

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Japan has a long history with plant medicines, including cannabis and psychedelics, but like most of the world, after WWII they were forced to change their drug laws to match those of the United States. Now, Japan is in a similar place to where the United States was back in the 1990s, with activists fighting to re-educate society about that rich history and a medical cannabis industry in its earliest phases.

Can You Bring Cannabis to Japan?

Before getting into Japanese cannabis laws, a word on bringing cannabis to Japan. As this Japanese Customs brochure makes clear, “Don’t even think about bringing drugs into JAPAN!” Punishments are different depending on the substance in question, and even legally prescribed opioids need pre-approval from the Japanese government or you may be arrested when you enter the country. When it comes to cannabis, importing cannabis to Japan with no intent to sell can be punished by up to seven years in prison, with intent to sell, it could become ten years. Simple possession of cannabis is up to five years, with intent to sell, it becomes seven years. By comparison, Japanese laws on selling opium are less restrictive than those for cannabis.

History of Cannabis Use In Japan

Japan has a long history with cannabis and hemp, dating back to the Jomon Period (roughly 11,000-300 B.C.), some of the earliest evidence of use is from pottery recovered from the Fukui Prefecture. Junichi Takayasu, who founded a cannabis museum in Tochigi Prefecture, is an expert on the history of cannabis in Japan and says “Most Japanese people see cannabis as a subculture of Japan but they’re wrong, Cannabis has been at the very heart of Japanese culture for thousands of years.” During the following millenia, cannabis and hemp played important roles in Japanese culture, with hemp being used to craft all manner of things from clothing to sacred Shinto rope, and cannabis based medicines available in drug stores until the 20th century.

Takayasu says that during WWII, “there was a saying among the military that without cannabis, the war couldn’t be waged.” Everything changed after WWII, when Japan lost the war the United States occupied Japan, and brought their prohibitionist view of drugs with them. 

Hemp and Religious Usage

Shintoism, the native belief system of Japan which predates historical records, is a spirituality that recognizes the divine spirit (Kami) of things in nature such as trees, mountains, and waterfalls. Shinto translates to “the way of the gods” and celebrates the seasons, showing reverence through a small shrine near the natural spirit being honored. Shinto also includes rituals to purify, which traditionally involve priests waving bundles of hemp leaves. 

Beyond bundles of hemp leaves, Shinto shrines are adorned with shimenawa, a sacred rope made from hemp. Given the importance of hemp to practitioners of Shinto, even though cannabis cultivation is very harshly regulated in Japan, there is a special license for people growing hemp to produce shimenawa. 

CBD Is Legal, But Limited

Thanks to a loophole in Japan’s Cannabis Control Act, CBD products derived from hemp have been legal since 2013, so long as they meet certain requirements. First off, it is effectively impossible to extract CBD from hemp grown in Japan, so all legal CBD products are imported, and those imported products must certify that they are THC-free. Secondly, the only legal CBD in Japan must be extracted from the stem and seeds only, which means, unlike France, CBD flower is not legal. 

Despite these limitations, a Tokyo-based research group estimates that the Japanese CBD industry was estimated to be $59 million in 2019, nearly 20 times what it was in 2015. Future projections anticipate the CBD industry in Japan could be $800 million by 2024. Part of the reason for that growth is that, just like in the U.S., clever chemists are tweaking CBD into THC-O and a range of other cannabinoids. 

Medical Cannabis Still a Work in Progress

While CBD is legal for some uses in Japan, at present, they still have not finalized their attempts at medical legalization which began in 2021, when the health ministry announced a plan to potentially reform the Cannabis Control Act. Part of that reform effort involved the creation of an expert committee, and those experts recommended various reforms, including medical cannabis legalization. Currently, the Cannabis Control Act uses a part-based system, where certain parts of the plant are prohibited or legal for use (and where the current CBD loophole came from). Experts hope that current reforms could include switching to an ingredient based system (just looking at cannabinoid content). The benefits of that switch could include the legalization of smoked or vaporized CBD flower, or possibly the birth of a medical cannabis industry. 

Psychedelics in Japan

Despite extremely restrictive laws around cannabis, psychedelic mushrooms, peyote, and other hallucinogens were legal in Japan until 2002. Those psychedelic plants were sold by street vendors and in vending machines at “love hotels,” and there generally was a permissive attitude towards plant psychedelics. That all changed in 2002, when Japanese authorities changed the law and closed the loophole around plant psychedelics, possibly because the World Cup raised concerns about hordes of soccer hooligans high on mushrooms. Those enterprising street vendors have not gone out of business, and now sell “dappou herb,” which is a similar idea to spice or bath salts (the quasi legal drugs), plant matter sprayed with substances that resembles other drugs (stimulants, cannabinoids, hallucinogens, etc). 

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