A London woman is facing drug trafficking charges after being caught with a hefty stash of marijuana at Boston's Logan Airport. The Suffolk County District Attorney's Office announced that 19-year-old Fareedat Folunsho was busted with about 70 pounds of the drug on her person.
Authorities charged Folunsho on Monday, and a judge has since set her bail at $1,500, and ordered her to give up her passport, according to the DA's office. She's due back in court for her probable cause hearing on May 21, 2024. The young Londoner was preparing to fly back to the U.K. on Sunday evening when a state trooper was called to the U.S. Customs Hall to apprehend her. Folunsho, now clapped in irons, finds herself the second U.K.-bound traveler to fall at Logan for marijuana trafficking in less than two months.
In the United Kingdom, where marijuana remains illegal, the street value of the drug is about $5,000 per pound, implicating an intended black market gain for the seized contraband in the hundreds of thousands, "These two arrests in a fairly short time span should make it quite clear to anyone else trying to fly marijuana to the U.K. through Boston that it’s not a good idea, to say the least. It didn’t work for these two women and it’s not likely to work for anyone else either," District Attorney Kevin Hayden said in the press release.
Roughly a month prior to Folunsho's arrest, another woman from Michigan was nabbed under similar circumstances at the same airport. This time, after attempting to transport around 74 pounds of marijuana packed in vacuum-seal bags within her luggage. Both cases underscore a determined, if not misguided, effort to funnel the controlled substance across the Atlantic, skirting the vigilant gaze of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, who prove yet again that they are not to be trifled with when it comes to such illicit endeavors.
