A woman has been arrested in western China after she swallowed 78 pellets of heroin, up to 1,700 times the minimum lethal dose.
The woman, who has not been named, was stopped by police at Turpan train station in the Xinjiang autonomous region after police noticed her behaving “erratically” during a routine security check, reported the China News Service on Sunday.
Eight white pills wrapped in plastic were found in her underwear during a body search. These later tested positively as heroin. Upon questioning the woman confessed to swallowing 78 pellets of the narcotic, the equivalent of 348 grams (12 oz).
According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction the estimated minimum lethal dose of heroin is 200mg, but addicts may be able to tolerate ten times as much.
The woman, who has now been arrested, was carrying over 1,700 times this amount.
The carrier was on her way from Chengdu the capital in Sichuan province to Shihezi, a small factory city of 640,000 people in northern Xinjiang, a train journey of 42 hours.
Shortly before alighting at Turpan the woman passed eight pellets.
Doctors at Turpan hospital later discovered the remaining 70 in her stomach along with other “unusual objects” during an X-ray, reported local news.
Turpan is a gateway between Xinjiang, one of China’s poorest regions and Western. State newspaper China Daily described it as a drug trafficking hub”.
Xinjiang borders the 'Golden Crescent', an area located between Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran known as the centre of opium production by global drug agencies.
In 2014, courts in Xinjiang heard 1,423 drug-related cases resulting in 1,252 people convicted, and in some cases sentenced to death. China has a 99.93 pc conviction rate, one of the world’s highest.
In June, Yu Huitang, the spokesman for Xinjiang High People's Court, said at a briefing in Urumqi that major crimes happen occasionally, while admitting that drug crime in the region had gone up.
In May, a Chinese man was caught smuggling heroin in his foreskin on a train from Beijing to Tibet. When they asked the unnamed man to take a urine test it showed a positive result for morphine.
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