Tokyo customs make what is believed to be Japan's largest bust of ketamine
TOKYO (AP) — Tokyo police and customs have made what is believed to be their biggest bust of the anesthetic drug ketamine, brought through Haneda airport in two suitcases.
On Friday Tokyo customs officials said they filed a criminal complaint against a French woman on suspicion of attempting to smuggle into Japan about 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of ketamine in a suitcase.
The suspect, whom the officials identified as a 21-year-old cook, was caught at the Haneda airport customs after arriving on a flight from Germany in April, officials at Tokyo Customs said.
The drug found in the suitcases has a street value of about 920 million yen ($8.8 million), according to Japan's NHK television.
Ketamine is a powerful anesthetic approved by U.S. health regulators for use during surgery. It can be given as an intramuscular injection or by IV.
The drug is used recreationally for its euphoric effects and can cause hallucinations or impact breathing and the heart.
——
This story has been corrected to note that the drugs were in two suitcases, not one.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Wall Street Journal
3 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
‘Daughters of the Bamboo Grove' Review: Twins Torn Apart
'You're not allowed to keep this child,' a Family Planning official informed Xiuhua. Another man held her wailing 21-month-old niece, Fangfang, the toddler reaching out for the only mother she had ever known. The group of men had caught Xiuhua off-guard moments earlier when they burst into the house and restrained her while they grabbed Fangfang. A group of neighbors heard the commotion and came running, attempting to assist Xiuhua as she pursued the departing officials, but they couldn't keep up with the car driving away from the village. On that steamy early spring day in 2002, Fangfang disappeared into China's indomitable child-welfare system. Xiuhua had understood the risk of taking in her niece: Fangfang and her twin sister, Shuangjie, had been born in violation of China's family-planning policy, often called the one-child policy. Their parents, Zanhua and Youdong, were farmers who already had two daughters and couldn't afford the fine that another child—let alone two—would incur. Zanhua had given birth to the twins in secret, then placed Fangfang with her brother and his wife to raise as their own. Shuangjie moved with her parents to Chongqing, where they worked as migrant laborers to save money for the exorbitant fines they anticipated. One day, if they earned enough, Zanhua and Youdong hoped to pay the fines, register the girls' births and reunite their family. But before that day arrived, the local Family Planning office had discovered the ruse and seized Fangfang. Family Planning cadres were not, officially, supposed to take children from their homes as punishment for policy violations. By the early 2000s, however, a thriving overseas adoption industry had become a byproduct of China's planned-birth regime, which the government had created in the late 1970s to help slow population growth while the country focused on economic development. A longstanding preference for sons over daughters led hundreds of thousands of families to abandon female children rather than risk fines or even violence at the hands of powerful Family Planning officials. Orphanages grew crowded, so in 1991 the government passed a new law permitting foreign adoption and watched the program take off. Barbara Demick movingly traces this history of overseas Chinese adoptions and their ripple effects on both sides of the Pacific in 'Daughters of the Bamboo Grove.' Other authors have written about the one-child policy, or the experience of adopting a Chinese daughter; Ms. Demick's skill shines through in her synthesis of the two stories.
CNN
5 hours ago
- CNN
Iranian state TV shows footage of Israeli drone
Iranian state TV aired footage purporting to show an Israeli Hermes drone that was shot down in Isfahan, Iran. CNN cannot independently verify the footage. In a statement, the IDF said a drone "fell in Iran" after a surface-to-air missile was fired towards an Israeli Air Force drone.
Bloomberg
7 hours ago
- Bloomberg
Air India Crash Information Vacuum Stokes Frustration, Rumors
Almost a week after India's worst passenger jet crash in nearly three decades, little is known about the recovery or investigative efforts. An official death toll has not been released, while conflicting media reports on everything from the number of victims to the plane's black boxes have swirled.
