Victoria Buchanan UK teacher dies swallowing cocaine at airport rather than throwing away £60 bag of left over drug at airport lounge.
A British teacher and mom of three has died after swallowing a bag of cocaine at Manchester Airport as opposed to discarding the contraband in the trash before flying home after a vacation in the UK.
Victoria Buchanan, 42, suffered a seizure in March when the baggie exploded in her stomach while she was waiting to board a Dubai-bound flight, the Manchester Evening News reported Tuesday.
While sipping champagne in the first class lounge, the woman realized she still had £60 ($76USD) worth of the drug in her possession.
Buchanan swallowed the leftover blow from her vacation before collapsing and going into cardiac arrest.
‘Onlookers thought she was intoxicated but then she started having a fit and [an] off duty nurse searched through her handbag and called her husband who told her an EpiPen was in her bag as she had had previous reactions to palm oil,’ the Manchester Evening News reported.
Buchanan was brought to Wythenshawe Hospital, where she later died.
Victoria Buchanan cocaine death: ‘We had no suspicion of drug taking.’
An inquest heard how Buchanan had earlier acquired £200 worth of the Class A drug during a family visit to the UK with her husband a shipping company boss.
She had £60 worth of cocaine left when she decided to swallow it in the hope of getting it back to Dubai – moments later she collapsed with a severe seizure when the bag burst in her stomach.
The bag of cocaine was discovered during a post-mortem.
An investigation into her overdose concluded with a court hearing determining the cause was ‘death by misadventure’.
‘We were aware she would take small amounts of cocaine occasionally and it was something we did together,’ her husband, Mark Buchanan, told the court. ‘I had left the UK a few days before, not a lot was left, not that that matters now.’
Victoria Buchanan originally from Kilmarnock, Scotland, had moved to Dubai in 2010 and worked as a teacher in the United Arab Emirates whilst her husband was believed to be head of fleet personnel for a shipping firm. She was known for helping impoverished children in Nepal through a charity set up to improve their education.
Offered the victim’s mother, ‘She was always so upbeat I wouldn’t have thought she needed them, it’s a different world.’
While the woman’s father said, ‘We had no suspicion of any drug taking.’
