Tea mistaken for drugs: mother and daughter spend months in prison

Australia
Police mistake tea for drugs: mother and daughter spend months in prison

Symbol photo. This is rooibos tea.

© BlueSnap / Shutterstock

Two women spent months in detention for trying to import brown ginger tea from their native Malaysia. There the drink is a popular remedy for period pain.

A woman and her daughter had ordered around 25 kilograms of brown ginger tea from their native Malaysia. Since the drink is a popular remedy for period pain there, the two women wanted to resell it for profit in Australia. Had they got rid of all the goods, they would have made a profit of 90 Australian dollars – but the two were arrested beforehand. According to Vice, the Australian authorities mistook tea for drugs.

Police stormed the house

After Australian Border Force (ABF) officials intercepted some of the tea packages at the international airport and mistakenly identified their contents as amphetamines, heavily armed police officers stormed their mother and daughter’s home in southwest Sydney in January.

Previously, the ABF appeared to have used a “Hazmat” test to identify the imported product as phenmetrazine, an illicit stimulant drug commonly used for recreational purposes. The police then confiscated the contents of the tea packs and replaced them with an inactive substance that was delivered to the women’s homes. A day later, they were seized during a raid on their house. The two women were then arrested and charged with drug trafficking

Problems with drug testing

An Australian court has now learned that the test only showed a spectrum of similar substances such as phenmetrazine – and that the illegal drug came fourth behind sugar, sucrose and powdered sugar. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, an ABF coroner wrote to the Bankstown police in February telling them that the sample had to be tested independently to make sure it actually contained phenmetrazine. However, the officer in charge did not pass this information on to the lawyers or the court, and so the two women had to remain in custody.

In April, another ABF officer emailed the same officer to inform her that laboratory results from two previous seizures of similar products had indicated that “no prohibited substances had been detected”. The ABF had also conducted its own forensic investigations and could not find any prohibited substances in the tea packets.

Errors only admitted in court

The two women were only released on bail in May and charges were withdrawn in August. But the police are not aware of any guilt and refuse to pay any compensation, which is why the two have now taken to court.

After cross-examining the two women’s attorney, the officer first admitted that she had asked for a forensic examination of the samples, but had informed the two women in prison that the previous examinations had yielded no results when the attorney asked why had not done that, the officer refused to testify. The case was adjourned to March 2022.

Sources: Vice, The Sydney Morning Herald.

This article originally appeared on stern.de.

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