Recently we went into Locked Up Abroad—one of my all-time favorite docuseries and TV shows—and lessons that should be taken away from the series.
Most episodes take place in the 1980s and 1990s which makes sense as far as people stumbling into these awful situations.
It’s the smuggling episodes based in the 2000s where it’s like “We have almost three decades worth of stories and major news archived on the internet involving people getting locked up overseas for smuggling. This is sounding like points against you.”
Before season three, seasons lasted for four episodes apiece. We’re going to put the best story of season one: the second episode detailing Sandra Gregory’s time in Thailand.
Thailand (The Sandra Gregory Story) – (Locked Up Abroad – Season 1, Episode 2)
This was one of those stories where it’s an interesting look at how people would travel the world with very little cash back then.
Just steady heading to places that might have strict laws about drugs, guerilla activity, organized crime activity, and so on.
On one hand, it might be at the forefront of people’s minds before planning a trip or whatever but should definitely be in the top three thoughts.
Sandra Gregory’s story was similar in that she was living in Bangkok while teaching English in 1993. She was also dealing with illness and running out of cash.
It was best to head back home at this point but that would be hard if she couldn’t make money.
In what would become a standard story for the series, she met another friendly native of her home country who ended up offering her a job to smuggle drugs out of the country and into Japan: another zero-tolerance drug country.
Usually, it’s either smuggling into a country or out of it but the usual result is getting caught at the airport. There always seems to be customs officers in a drug hub country who are on the lookout for foreigners.
In Gregory’s situation, she was the one with 89 grams of heroin and sat in jail for three years of a 25-year sentence—dropped from a life sentence. She was 11 grams short of facing the death penalty.
In prison, she made friends and endured awful conditions and overcrowding before being sent back to England to serve her sentence in 1997.
Three years later, following pleas and petitioning to the King of Thailand, she was pardoned.
Why This Episode Was So Great
Ms. Gregory’s story set the pace for what we could expect to see for the next twelve seasons of the show. While it was the first of many, it stands out just by being the first such story told in the series.
Think about it: there are multiple stories that follow the same progression. Someone’s a foreign country, some situation happens where they don’t have the money or support system to stay in the country, the country is known to have a hard stance against drugs, and they end up getting busted for smuggling.
The majority of the time, it’s the person who decides to roll the dice on smuggling on the first time who gets caught.
In the other cases of similar stories, someone might have gotten away with it a few times before getting caught. It wasn’t even a “rookie mistake” in Sandra Gregory’s case.
It’s not “surprised Pikachu face” when someone doing mule work gets caught if they’re showing nervousness. The best thing about the episode is how Ms. Gregory retells her story and how the reenactments weren’t romanticized like ID docuseries.
There was a darkness and grittiness to the reenactments that mirrored a gritty, dark story of a gritty, dark illicit business where those who aren’t made for it or have knowledge of it are the ones to suffer.
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