God, diarrhea, fentanyl, and pup play? Euphoria is back, alright.
In the Season 3 premiere, which comes more than four years after its predecessor, we’re given a look at how Zendaya’s Rue and company have splintered off into the real world after high school. As Rue explains via narration, she was “working at a smoke shop” at one point, only for Laurie (played by Martha Kelly) to show up at her job with a stern reminder of an exorbitant debt. (We already knew this much thanks to trailers, but what follows could be considered mild spoilers for the episode, so tread lightly.)
After being informed by Laurie that she’ll settle for $100,000 to wipe the debt clean, Rue is tossed into the life of a mule, requiring her to—and this process is shown in vomit-inducing detail—swallow balloons filled with drugs.
“The most important thing is to make sure each balloon is properly sealed,” Rue notes in the narration, adding that she later enlisted her friend Faye (played by Chloe Cherry) to join her in the mule-ing.
While underscoring the utmost importance of this part of the process, Rue notes the inherent dangers of transporting drugs in this fashion.
“The danger of body-packing is if a balloon breaks, you die,” she says as we’re shown a quick scene of a woman walking through an airport.
The woman collapses, before the episode jumps to a shot of an X-ray showing a slew of balloons in her system. Doctors then go back and forth about the estimated amount of drugs found inside the dead woman’s body, ultimately deciding to “go fishing” by extracting them and cleaning off the blood.
Naturally, some viewers might be wondering whether this is a real concern for drug mules. In short, it very much is.
Below, we take a closer look.
Euphoria Season 3 premiere: Can a drug mule actually drop dead from balloons bursting in their body?
For those unfamiliar, body-packing typically sees a mule swallowing drugs packaged inside balloons. For the balloons, condoms are often used, with the version of the practice depicted in Euphoria also bringing in K-Y Jelly water-based lubricant.
As the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime explains, the risk of death enters the equation during the transportation process itself. According to the agency, the practice “can lead and has led to the death of persons” due to the potential for balloons to rupture inside the body, sometimes due to acids in the stomach. This type of death, per the UNODC, is “very quick.”
Drug mule deaths have been formally documented in the past, including in this paper published by Forensic Science International way back in the mid-2000s. Body packers, as researchers detailed in their findings at the time, can indeed die from acute drug intoxication if a smuggled package ruptures in their gastrointestinal tract.
