In the Yamanashi Prefecture of Japan, three Nigerian men were admitted to an emergency room with abdominal pain and constipation. Seventeen hours later, one of them died of an extreme methamphetamine overdose. A lab test found so much of the illicit drug in his urine that an average person could get high from drinking a single sip.

One week prior, during a trip to China, he had wrapped half a kilogram of the white powder in thirty-five separate packages made from shrink wrap and clear plastic tape.

Apparently, the parcels were too large to pass through his intestine, so they remained stuck in his stomach. By the time that the smuggler reached the emergency room, six of the bags had ruptured. One of them was completely empty.

A report of the incident, which appeared in the September issue [subscription] of the Journal of Forensic Sciences, includes graphic pictures of the stomach, which was stuffed to capacity with the deadly cargo.

Kenichi Takekawa, a scientist at the Yamanashi Prefectural Forensic Science Laboratory, took advantage of the dark situation to learn several valuable lessons in toxicology.

First and foremost, it answered the question: How much meth does it take to kill someone?

The oldest of the three men died when about twenty grams of the drug leaked into his digestive tract. His younger friend survived an eighteen gram dose of the same poison. The levels of methamphetamine in their blood serum were quite similar (around 8.6 ?g/mL if you are curious).

When the three men were admitted to the hospital, the staff took samples of their blood. After the sickest of the three died, the levels of meth in his body fluids had increased sevenfold. Other scientists have made the same observation – levels of the drug shoot up dramatically after death. This could be very important in forensic investigations. If a coroner does not take that into account, they could mistake an accidental overdose for a suicide.

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