Someone paid for a 36-year-old Brazilian woman's flights and hotel, handed her seven bottles of shampoo, and promised her $50,000 to carry them to Bali. Now she's sitting in an Indonesian jail facing a possible death sentence. The shampoo was cocaine. About 8 pounds of it, dissolved into liquid so it would pass for normal toiletries in her suitcase. Customs at the Bali airport pulled her aside on October 6 and opened the bottles. She told police a man she only knew as "G" set the whole thing up. $50,000 sounds like a crazy amount to pay someone to carry a bag. It starts to make sense once you see what cocaine sells for over there. In Bolivia, where a lot of it is grown, a gram goes for around $6. In countries with brutal drug laws the price goes through the roof. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have the most expensive cocaine on Earth, roughly $270 to $290 a gram, and the main reason is the punishment. Every person down the chain charges extra for the risk of spending decades in a cell, or worse. Indonesia sits in that same tier. When Bali police seized about 3 pounds from a British man in February, they valued it at up to $358,000. Which means the harsh law is quietly doing the recruiting. The scarier the penalty, the higher the price, and the more money there is to dangle in front of somebody back home in Brazil. Brazil has been through this before. Back in 2003, a hang-gliding instructor from Manaus named Marco Archer agreed to fly 13.4 kilos of cocaine from Peru to Jakarta, stuffed inside the tubes of his hang glider. His fee was $10,000, which comes out to about $750 a kilo. This woman was offered closer to $13,700 a kilo. Even after you adjust for 20-plus years of inflation, couriers are getting paid something like 10 times more for the same job. Archer spent 11 years in prison. In January 2015 Indonesia executed him by firing squad, making him the first Brazilian ever executed in another country. Brazil's president called Indonesia's president the day before and begged for his life, and when they went ahead with it anyway, Brazil pulled its ambassador out of Jakarta. Every year or two, another Brazilian lands in Bali with roughly the same suitcase. A 19-year-old girl got caught with around 3 kilos in 2023. This February a court there gave a 25-year-old 18 years for almost the same amount. And this woman's own friend told reporters back home she wasn't even struggling for money. Indonesia made getting caught about as costly as a country possibly can, and the people running this keep raising the offer to match. There's always going to be someone who looks at $50,000 plus a free trip to Bali and decides the odds are fine.