A 42 year old British mother of three children, living and working in Dubai as a teacher since 2010, was headed back there when she realized she still had $75 worth of cocaine with her.
British expat teacher Victoria Buchanan, 42, ate the resealable bag when she realized she still had the drugs in her possession whilst drinking a glass of champagne after she checked in with her luggage.
She and her husband had purchased about three times that amount. He had headed home days earlier, and she was meeting him back in Dubai. Realizing she still had some left, she decided the best course of action was to swallow it while waiting in the Manchester, UK Aspire lounge which she likely would have accessed using a Priority Pass card.
The lounge is after security and passport control, so it’s unlikely she’d have been stopped prior to her flight in any case. Emirates operates the route with three Airbus A380s daily. If she was thinking at all clearly she may have been worried about holding onto the cocaine while heading through immigration formalities at the Dubai airport.
She went into cardiac arrest and was taken to a nearby hospital where she passed away.
Aspire Lounge, Manchester UK, Credit: Priority Pass
There are some readers who might well fancy the idea that when they go it will be from cocaine while drinking champagne in an airport lounge. This however is a sad tragedy, though it’s hard to comprehend the choice to swallow a bag of cocaine in order to smuggle it back to Dubai.
I don’t understand why she didn’t flush it down the lounge toilet. After all, it was only $75!!!!
Wow! Tragic story. I also wonder why she ingested it versus just throwing it away (either at the lounge or while on the plane.)
That reminds me of the time in HK when we were about to head to the airport for Singapore and my friend was debating on what to do with a few grams of powder left. He wanted to take it with him, I said that’s stupid, we’re going to Singapore they don’t look kindly on that.
He just finished off a couple of lines. I would imagine $75 in the UK doesn’t buy you that much vs Colombia, so she could’ve easily just finished it off.
A little weird to put a link for PP lounges in a post about someone’s death. Not an affiliate link, but still…
Not sure why people are confused about why she swallowed it vs flushing it. Story is clear. She wanted to smuggle it in to dubai to use later. She wasn’t trying to get rid of it.
@Bill, If she actually had a preexisting plan to smuggle it, she wouldn’t have gone through security with it. Seems pretty clear she didn’t even realize she had it, at which point, what is the idiotic thought process that leads to, “rather than ditch this low-dollar amount of blow that I was just perfectly happy about not having at all, I’ll risk my life swallowing it in advance of a long-haul flight?”
A fitting ending to a drug addict, except at the wrong place to “finish” it that has caused disturbance to many others around.
Natural selection…21st century version.
MAN T1 is a lousy terminal. Cramped, extremely long security waits and just plain ugly. Access to the mediocre Aspire Lounge makes it slightly more tolerable. When I was there I immediately headed for the booze to attempt to make me feel better after the ordeal just to get there so who am I to judge this lady using a different substance as a similar coping method for life’s ills?
But my question is, why couldn’t she just simply toss the excess blow? Put it in a fast food bag or whatever and throw it in trash bin. Just a warning to those in similar situations of what not to do.
No point of wondering why a braindead cokehead swallows a lethal quantity of drug instead of tossing it away. If she had any brain left, she would have thrown it away.
The real scary thing here is that she was a teacher !!
How can Dubai authority let a drug addict be a teacher?
@shza In the end she still decided to smuggle it because she wanted to do her cocaine when she got to Dubai. Her thought process was that she would sneak it into another country because she is a drug user. It wasn’t a mistake it was a conscious decision on her part to try to smuggle it to dubai. Whether she did something to conceal it when going through security or she discovered it in the lounge the end result is the same. She swallowed it to smuggle it into another country.
@Boardingareaflukie she certainly could have done that but she didn’t want to throw her cocaine out she wanted to bring it home to use later. Sad that someone with three children that works as a teacher engages in this type of absurd behavior.
Cocaine makes people do stupid things. If she wanted to dispose of it, she could have walked into a toilet, wrapped the baggie in tissue paper and chucked it into the bin.
It appears she got greedy.
“A fitting end”, “natural selection”, “brain dead cokehead “, etc. Also a mother of three but it seems there is no limit to the cruel and hateful comments some can make in the face of a tragedy.