OK, time for my plastic bag re-use story.
Early 1999, I was traveling around Asia for a month, economies there were in the toilet so fares were ridiculously cheap, so I bopped down to visit Australia for a long weekend, with a last-minute visa.
I had been going to all sorts of “dangerous” places so I had hidden my stashes of cash in my luggage, wrapped in plastic bags picked up most likely at the Berkeley Farmer’s Market bag exchange.
As a shaggy single guy fresh from wandering around Vietnam, Thailand and Hong Kong, I got the expected level of scrutiny from customs upon arrival in Perth. Everything in my baggage inspected in detail, and some items scanned, by a mass spectrometer or something that picks up traces of elements on items.
The claimed to have found traces of LSD on one of my plastic bags. It was a Walmart bag, and I had never bought anything at Walmart, so I figure that somebody had used it to hold their stash before exchanging it at the market, perhaps inspired by the big smiley face on the side.
Fortunately, my story stayed consistent during the interview, it matched that of the guy picking me up, I had a copy of a magazine I edited, with my picture, and no actual drugs were on my person, so I made it onto the continent without more intrusive searches.
Alternative theory: I was using the bag to carry a wad of money, and everybody knows that there’s lots of drugs on money, right?
