It seems that kids today haven’t seen Brokedown Palace, and it shows. The 1999 thriller film featured Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsdale as teens who went to prison for drug smuggling in Thailand, and it scared an entire generation of women to avoid drug smuggling at all costs.
But it seems Gen Z missed the memo, because drug smuggling is becoming more of an issue for young women traveling around the world. British women Bella May Culley, 18, and Charlotte May Lee, 21, are suspected of being drug mules.
A nursing student from northeast England, Culley allegedly tried to smuggle 30 pounds of cannabis into the former Soviet country of Georgia earlier this month. She reached the country after traveling around the Philippines and Thailand and was promptly arrested. She claims she is pregnant, and that a mystery man whom she fell in love with was part of the drug smuggling operation.
Meanwhile Lee is a former flight attendant from south London who was caught with more than 100 pounds of ‘Kush,’ a synthetic strain of cannabis that contains remnants of human bones, in Sri Lanka.
Both Brits have denied the charges, but face decades behind bars if convicted. There is hope for them, though, because not everyone thinks they acted alone.
There is an investigation into whether Thailand gangs are targeting naïve travelers according to Jemal Janashia, a former police general in Georgia and a top drug crime expert. He suggested that local investigators will explore “the possibility of a link” between the two cases. It seems that a Thai police crackdown on postal drug deliveries in Thailand may have led local gangs to find alternative smuggling options, and Georgia is the perfect middle transit point, as it is visa-free for those with EU passports.
And as both women are young and claim to have been influenced to carry the drugs, there is a chance that they were simply pawns in a complex trafficking operation.
One OnlyFans star has been keeping an eye on these cases, as she faced her own drug smuggling arrest just a few short years ago. Levi-April Whalley is a former nurse from the UK who was caught trying to smuggle 77 pounds of marijuana into her home country in 2023. The content creator was returning from New York City when she was found to have 70 heat-sealed bags inside her luggage that ended up being $217,000 worth of drugs.
But unlike Lee and Culley, Whalley faced justice in the UK where she was given an 18-month suspended sentence instead of decades in prison. Whalley acknowledges how lucky she was to be arrested in the UK compared to another country.
“I believe if I was caught abroad, it would have been a completely different outcome for myself,” she said. “I believe I would have been in the same situation as them.”
Whalley sees herself in the other two women, as she too was vulnerable and fell prey to becoming a drug mule to escape her situation.
“I was not in a good place and could say I was somewhat vulnerable at the time. These are two young girls – and I believe that’s probably the same situation for them,” she explained.
That’s why Whalley is hoping that her story, along with the other two women’s, will show other women the risk of agreeing to smuggle drugs.
“Just because I had a suspended sentence should not set a precedent for others to do it,” she said, adding that the other women’s situation shows that there are very different outcomes depending on where you are, and that you should never agree to bring anyone’s suitcase back — no matter how nice they are to you.