BOC on alert for shabu packed in plastic bottles

Bureau of Customs Commissioner Ruffy Biazon: A warning. INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—Watch out for methamphetamine hydrochloride, more popularly known as shabu, concealed in plastic bottles of mineral water.

Bureau of Customs Commissioner Ruffy Biazon issued the warning on Tuesday to all BOC personnel at the country’s major airports and sea ports.

The BOC is now on “double alert” monitoring passenger arrivals in light of a YouTube viral video showing shabu sachets inside a bottle of mineral water.

According to Biazon, BOC operatives have yet to catch drug smugglers using the technique.

But “we have seen it all and stopped most, if not all of these attempts to smuggle illegal drugs at the airports even with the new techniques used by drug traffickers to confuse our operatives in detecting illegal drugs,” he noted.

Biazon believes “smuggling shabu using bottled mineral water will most likely be for personal consumption only because the technique would not be viable for commercial type of drug smuggling operation.”

“The BOC, however, is not lying low on its watch for this type of drug trafficking,” he asserted.

The Customs head stressed “smuggling of drugs, whether in small or large quantities, will never be tolerated by the BOC.”

Customs personnel, he said, “have seized kilos of shabu concealed in false walls of luggage, stuffed in toys or in any item drug traffickers think would not be noticed by our operatives.”

“But our pro-active measures to stop the illegal drugs trade are paying off well,” Biazon noted.

For the nth time, he warned travelers against “accepting any requests from strangers to carry packages of any kind to their countries of destination.”

“I advise travelers not to accept any request to bring along packages in their trips if they haven’t seen their contents, especially if the person making the request is not personally known to them,” Biazon told reporters.