STONED IN THE U.A.E

In October 2007, I travelled overseas for the first time. Backpacking around Europe has become like a rite-of-passage for young middle class Australians. However, unlike the drunken gaggles of obnoxious young Aussies I encountered on my trip, my Mummy and Daddy didn’t pay for my holiday.

No, as usual, I used my skills to pay the bills, harvesting a good-sized hydro crop, five plants of a primo strain of dope that paid for my ticket and netted me about twenty k play money, paying for my trip.

Before I delve further, I feel it’s important to give readers a little more back-story so you have bit of insight as to where my fucked-up head was at, on said Euro-trip.

Firstly, on my journey’s, I have come to find that most people travelling are either a) running from something or b) looking for something.

I was running from - a fucked up love triangle where I was sleeping with two great women, my ex girlfriend and my current girlfriend at the time, basically cheating and lying to them both, somehow coming to be in love with both of them, if that’s even possible.

I was looking for – some kind of sign or answer as to which girl I would eventually go with, if either of them would still have me, once I’d returned.

Secondly, prior to my trip, I had spent two years on the Suboxone Opiate Replacement Therapy. I had started off in 2005 on twelve milligrams of 'bupe' a day and by 2007 had finally reduced to zip. Zip. Zero. Nothing. Nada. Stone-free! With some discipline, some good counselling and some Chinese herbs, I was finally clean! I mean really clean, like for the first time in my adult life!

Before I set off on my trip, I felt it necessary to do the rounds and catch up with the folks who I really gave a shit about, a.k.a my friends and family. As any ‘recovering’ user knows, these kind of catch ups can be fraught with land-mines. Sure enough, my 3 months of pre-trip cleanliness quickly went out the window and a couple of weeks before I’d boarded the plane I found myself dabbling. I justified the lapse to myself, saying that the use was only small-scale and recreational. But deep down, after two years of good behaviour on the bupe, I knew that I had, to quote Fatboy Slim, ‘retoxed the freak in me’ and I was jetting off on what could possibly be the MOTHER of all binges, a EURO-BINGE… if not my FINAL binge!

My sister dropped me off at the airport and I set off for Europe with no real plan or itinerary, just a brand new, overloaded, Kakadu backpack, a bank account full of money and, in the back of my mind, a hankering to get over to Europe and sample some of the best gear that the world has to offer.

First stop was London but before landing in London there were a couple of short stop-overs on the plane in Singapore and then Dubai.

At the time, I had an old girlfriend living in Dubai, a girl who I was nuts about in high school, who I will always remember as the first girl I’d ever dry-humped-till-cummin’-in-my-pants and finger-banged. We had been in touch over facebook and I kind of planned to maybe drop in and visit her in Dubai on my way home from Europe and maybe pick-up where the finger-banging left off. In Singapore, I stayed in the airport, but the stop over in Dubai was like four hours and even though I barely had enough time to travel into the city, I still wanted to go outside of the airport and get a feel for the joint and have a look around. Bad idea!

As soon as I hit Customs, presented my passport and crossed the line out into the foyer of the airport, a big Arab dude in flowing white robes approached me, eyeballing me.

“Salaam,” I greeted.

The big-Arab-in-flowing-white-robes-dude grabbed me firmly by the arm and grunted, “Come this way.”

“What’s up?’

Soldiers, packing sub-machine guns, swarmed around us and I was marched  to an office. It was quite a scene.

To give you a better visual, I’m a six-foot-four white dude with tatts and dreads down to my ass. My logic when crossing through international check-points is – if I were some kind of trafficker or mule or was stupid enough to have gear concealed in my a-hole, don’t ya think I would be doing something about my look and physical appearance, like maybe getting a haircut or suiting up or whatever the fuck. Not just kind’a flaunting the fact that. 'yeah, I like to get on it'. It’s kind’a a reverse psychology thing, right?

So, here I am in a United Arab Emirates customs office with the big Arab dude in the flowing white robes and a soldier with a sub machine gun standing over me, asking me questions.

“Show me your passport.” SURE!

“Show me your ticket” NO PROBLEM!

“Empty your pockets” OK!

“Give me your wallet” HERE YOU GO!

“Do you smoke hashish?” NO! (Hashish is a rare commodity in Australia.) 

“When was the last time you smoked hashish?’’ I DUNNO, DO YOU HAVE ANY?

I was then marched out of the office into another office where there was a bright blue and orange gym bag on a counter.

“Is this your bag?”

The whole thing was starting to make more sense. So Customs, through sniffer dogs or whatever methods, had somehow detected some kinda illicit contraband in the blue and orange gym bag. And for some reason these dudes thought it was mine. I just kept harking back to my plane ticket – ‘I’M NOT EVEN VISITING YOUR COUNTRY. I’M HERE ON A STOP-OVER. AND, NO! I HAVE NEVER SEEN THAT BAG BEFORE IN MY LIFE!’ Which were probably the famous last words of Barlow and Chambers, Schapelle Corby and many other convicted drug mules.

But I was kind’a being smart-arsey about it too, so confident was I that in about fifteen minutes these dudes would be handing my passport back to me and apologising.

“Take off your clothes!” WHATEVER. 

I took off my jeans and watched the big-Arab-dude-in-flowing-white-robes feel around the hems and seams of my jeans and T-shirt for concealed drugs.

“Show me your arms!” OK. So there was still track-marks from my recent blast before lift-off. Not a good look. But, hey, I still didn’t have anything to worry about. Did I?

The big Arab dude stepped closer, ‘Let me look in your pants.’ WHATEVER. 

I pulled my boxers forward so he could peer down at my junk. He gestured for me to spin around and I felt him pull the elastic at the back of my pants, looking down my crack. 

Uh-oh, here it comes. 

We went through the whole ‘Pull down your underwear, bend over, touch your toes, spread your cheeks and cough’ thing.

‘What is this?’ The Arab dude held up a tiny baggie of white powder, which he had just extracted from a hidden compartment in my wallet. 

'WHAT THE FUCK?’

At first I thought maybe they had loaded me up with it, but then I recognised the bag...

...It was stamped with little red and blue Superman logos and I remembered the night clearly, a month or so before, my mate Salty had given me some coke in Revolver nightclub. Well, it wasn’t quite coke – 'Mother of Pearl' as it was marketed – just basically speed and coke cut together. And by Australian standards, pretty shit coke at that! I remembered racking most of the bag in the seedy dunny’s at Revolver, saving two points of a gram for a blast later that night. Obviously, I’d never got around to blasting the gear.

Suddenly my smart-arsey bravado evaporated, I felt myself physically deflate and my face began to burn with hot flushes.

This was the United Arab Emirates. These sand-niggers did not fuck around. The U.A.E is infamous for it’s draconian laws. I was in the land of public stonings, with a couple of points of shitty speed / coke in my wallet, fresh track marks on my arms, an orange and blue gym bag containing fuck knows what belonging to fuck knows who that they were trying to load me up with, with some big mean white-robed Arab and a soldier clutching a sub-machine gun standing over me.

He asked me again, ‘What’s this?’ He looked proud.

‘Ummm, candy,’ I shrugged. ‘CANDY! WHAT THE FUCK? Surely I could have come up with something better than that!’

The Arab replied ‘Nose candy?’

Damn right! ‘NO, not nose candy. SHERBERT! YUM!’ What the fuck was I babbling on with.

The dude in the flowing white robes disappeared, I assume to swab / analyse / run the baggie through some kind of tester to determine exactly what type of ‘candy’ the white powder really was.

At this stage of the game I was recalling my days as a Catholic altar boy and pumping out my ‘Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee’s’. I was also playing out in my mind that awkward telephone call to the Australian Embassy in Dubai in which I explained to them that I was busted with a small baggie of white powder. And, I was beginning to wonder what the fuck it would be like being detained in an Arab jail where I spoke absolutely no Arabic, apart from salaam alaikum. Oh yeah, I would be fucked. Sooo fucked, like, literally. A body search is one thing but I was not looking forward to dick-in-ass action inside an Arab prison.

Flowing-white-robe dude returned, grabbed me by the arm and he and sub-machine gun-man frog-marched me back out into the foyer of the airport.

There, we met a higher-ranking soldier or police officer, presumably their boss, who was sitting on a bench seat alongside an older man, a civilian. Higher-ranking soldier was one swarthy-looking, chilled out mofo. He didn’t subscribe to the beard, just an almost Dali-esque moustache, sitting there casually with his legs crossed, looking kind'a camp.

Big-flowing-white-robe dude handed his superior Officer Moustache the baggie of white powder. The chilled-out Officer Moustache held the baggie up to the light and flicked it.

“Where are you going?” Asked Moustache. 

I calmly replied, “London. I’m just on a stop-over. I went outside for a cigarette. My bags are still on the plane. My plane is leaving very soon. I’m not coming back here.”

I showed Officer Moustache my airplane tickets.

He looked them over and could see that, indeed, I was on just a stop over. He passed the tickets back to me. “Then you don’t want to miss your flight. Get out of here.”

Big-flowing-white-robe-dude looked almost pissed off.

Officer Moustache casually slipped the couple of shitty points of ‘Mother of Pearl’ speed / coke into his breast pocket.

“Thank you, Sir!” I smiled, relieved. 

I didn’t even look back. I pushed my way through the customs line-up, re-entered the airport and sprinted back to my departure lounge.

I was rushing when I took my seat on the plane. Maybe the ‘Mother of Pearl’ powder tested inconclusive? Maybe Officer Moustache was building up his own personal stash outta seized contraband. Maybe there is a God and my Hail Mary’s where answered? Whatever the fuck, I was lucky.

But my extreme luckiness was only fully realised after I spoke to my former teen fingerbangin’ girlfriend in Dubai. She explained to me the severity of some of the laws in the U.A.E in relation to carrying illicit substances, any substances, into the country. The mandatory sentence for possession of even cannabis is 4 years imprisonment. There have been also been cases of tourists being detained for up to two years in prison for possession of codeine based pain-killers and sleeping pills.

And, get this for fucked up and a major violation of human rights - U.A.E nationals can even be detained and have their BLOOD FORCIBLY TAKEN by customs officials and, should they test positive, be imprisoned, even if they had consumed a drug, say like weed, in another country, even if it were legal in that country, such as in Amsterdam, and they haven’t even  officially broken any law. 

She also told me to never bother coming back, as my name and passport number would go on a customs register and from that point on I could expect to be detained, questioned and anally violated if I were to ever again show my face in Dubai again.

Here is a link from the BBC with information on laws for tourists travelling to Dubai. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7234786.stm

Like me, you will be shocked to read that there is currently some poor dude doing time in a Middle-Eastern prison after customs found traces of poppy seeds on his clothing - crumbs from a bread roll he had eaten on a flight. What the fuck?

Fair Trials International, http://www.fairtrials.net/, is also a helpful resource, should you somehow find yourself on the wrong side of the law in Dubai, or anywhere in the world for that matter. But, then again, if you do find yourself in a lock-up in Dubai, I seriously doubt that you’ll be able to access to the net to look up said website.

If, like me, you like to indulge in the illicit recreational substance, then the moral to this story is; always, ALWAYS, clean out your wallet / bags / clothing / pockets / secret compartments before you travel overseas and across international borders kiddies! And I don’t just mean clean, I mean vacuum, scrub, swab, bleach, Dettol bath the fuck out of it. Travel safe peeps!

To be continued…. Stay tuned for more blogs on my Euro Binge! Up next, WAKING UP DEAD IN SOHO!