• Amal N Vadysinghe, Yapa Banda, Solokara Thilakarathne, and Liyanage Liyanage.
• Department of Forensic Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
• Arch Med Sadowej Kryminol. 2019 Jan 1; 69 (3): 129-136.

AbstractThe human body is often used for illegal drug trafficking around the world. This may be done by concealing the drugs inside the body, so-called "body packing". This can lead to life-threatening conditions, mainly by leakage of the illegal substances in lethal amounts into the circulation system, which may cause fatal consequences due to acute drug overdose. Most of these cases present as sudden unexpected deaths. However, we present herein a case in which the death of an unidentified victim, which was notified as a case of seawater drowning in a non-suspicious manner, but later proved to be the death of a body packer as a result of drowning due to a morphine overdose. This case highlights the importance of investigating deaths even in unidentified bodies and the different presentations of fatal consequences of a body packer, which previously have not been described in literature.

18 keywords...

hide…