In what appears to be a massive failure of common sense, two women and one man from Quebec were busted in late August with 200 pounds of cocaine in Sydney Harbor. That’s a lot of cocaine. In fact, the bust was Australia’s biggest in history—by air or sea. Where the drugs came from and who was responsible for the plan to smuggle $23 million of Bolivian marching powder into Australia, is anyone’s guess.
What makes this story extra weird is the social media trail that the two women left behind them. According to Vice, Melina Roberge, 22 and Isabelle Lagace, 28, posted photos of themselves on Facebook and Instagram while they enjoyed what looks like a fabulous 66-day vacation cruise aboard the MS Sea Princess. The vessel departed Southampton, England then began a world tour that included stops in exotic locales like New York, Tahiti and Peru. Their suitcases, the Australian police quipped, “did not have much room for clean underwear or spare toothbrushes.”
WTF is Happening with These Selfies
In their social media selfie spree, Lagace and Roberge look eerily calm for two ladies hauling their combined body weight in cocaine across the equator and back. If anything, they look like your average Instagram models, working their angles in the many selfies that have been snatched up by the media. In one pic which appeared on Facebook, the young women look like dark-haired sisters, leaning into one another—one holding a green coconut with a straw, the other a souvenir with the word “Mom” painted on it. They’re both in bikinis with ample side-boob and requisite thigh gap. I swiped through the images, wondering if the willingness to document and hashtag a crime as it is being committed in real time is the thing that really separates Gen Y, Millennials and Boomers.
The third involved party, a 63-year-old citizen of Quebec named André Jorge Tamine, was not shown in the women’s pictures, though he was a passenger on board the MS Sea Princess. His connection to the two women is unclear: was he a liaison between them and the crime syndicate that Police Commander Tim Fitzgerald believes was attempting to flood the Australian market with cocaine? Was Tamine the instigator? Were all three of them mules? Is this a Canadian remake of Brokedown Palace?
TFW You Realize They Think You’re a Columbian Drug Lord
Cocaine fetches a high price in Australia—a whopping five times its value in Canada. That’s good incentive for criminals who want to multiply their take. The punishment, however, is nothing to laugh at. 200 pounds (or 95 kilos) qualifies as a “commercial” quantity—which could mean a sentence of life in prison for the Selfie Smugglers if they’re convicted.
Currently, Lagace, Roberge, and Tamine are being held without bail. This is probably not what they expected: according to Vice, “the day before her arrest, Roberge posted a photo of the phrase ‘When you wake up and need a nap.’” Normal girl stuff. What’s next, an inspirational meme of a puppy stuck in a bucket with the caption “when u twapped wiffout bail, lolz?”
A cursory search revealed that both Lagace and Roberge’s Instagram accounts have since been made private. I found one Facebook profile for an Andre Tamine in Quebec. He has 11 friends, seems kind of depressed and is probably not the criminal mastermind in question.
Finally, a Cure for FOMO
Before their accounts were locked, Lagace and Roberge’s posts got a lot of attention—especially the day after the bust. One photo, captioned “In my top 5 for sure #equateur” got 941 likes and 100 comments. The photos that made it onto the CNN news feed show the women riding ATVs in Peru, sipping Irish coffees and exploring South America’s beaches. TBH, the trip looked like a blast, and the plan (whatever it was) probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Think about it: tickets for the cruise alone cost $20,000 each. According to one source, Roberge was most recently employed as a jewelry sales associate at Pandora—a basic retail job that would annually earn about the price of one of those cruise-liner tickets. Can you imagine being made an offer for an all-expense-paid cruise, traveling around the world with your BFF enjoying every luxury and #TreatYoSelf you could dream of? And all you have to do is take an extra 200 pounds of luggage with you? Yeah, I’d have a hard time saying no, too—especially if I was 22 and sick of working at the mall.
It would be too easy to dismiss this as a one-off case of Millennials gone wild. If anything, Lagace and Roberge’s photos suggest that there’s likely a world of willing risk-takers out there—and that for the FOMO/YOLO generation, there’s a whole new way to get caught if you’re a drug mule.
Sponsored DISCLAIMER: This is a paid advertisement for California Behavioral Health, LLC, a CA licensed substance abuse treatment provider and not a service provided by The Fix. Calls to this number are answered by CBH, free and without obligation to the consumer. No one who answers the call receives a fee based upon the consumer’s choice to enter treatment. For additional info on other treatment providers and options visit www.samhsa.gov.
