Drugs for a Fine (Clip) | To Catch a Smuggler | National Geographic

You said this was what, again? Okay, just give me a second to positive for ketamine hydrochloride, which is a DEA controlled substance. It's illegal to transport into the U.S. It's illegal to have in the U.S. without a prescription.

I honestly didn’t know that was in the bags he had some medications in here. Is everything prescribed here? And this one found another baggie of brown salt-like substance. So we're going to have to do our checks and just determine what the substances.

Alright sir. Come right in here. Just put your bags upon the table. We're going to check your body, make sure you don't have anything on talking to pat down. We're going to recheck your bags, make sure we didn't miss anything. And then we're going to process this thing where we're going to go from there right in.

Patting the individual down, we located a small baggie of a white powdery substance inside his right pocket, took it out, asked him what it was. He immediately said, "Oh, I didn't know it was there." So now we're going to go and retest everything and just to verify what we found.

First one, ketamine hydrochloride. Again, ketamine always turns up blue. When we tested cocaine hydrochloride, the third one's MDMA, the white powder turned out to be cocaine hydrochloride. The ten color salt-like substance turned out to be MDMA, and the pink powder is positive for ketamine hydrochloride.

We're just going to put you right back in here. What is going to happen is we're going to charge you a penalty. The penalty is $5,000. We can mitigate it down to $500. This is the one break you're getting. If you want to call us, you pay the $500. You get some paperwork, and you'll be on your way, right?

The passenger was charged a fine. He was allowed to be released upon paying the fine. Some things that led into that were his, you know, his cooperation with us, the amount of substances he had on him. Just in the future, make sure you know what you're bringing in your pockets, in your bags.

Alright. That does happen. Often passengers say, "Oh, I don't know what was inside this bag," but part of our inspection is we ask those questions. Is this your bag? Everything inside belongs to you. So before we even open it up, you're taking responsibility for anything that we find inside.