The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Drugs
 dead baby cocaine smuggling




Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: stevet@eskimo.com (Steven Thornton)
Subject: Edna Buchanan Debunks Cocaine Baby
Date: Sun, 26 Feb 1995 21:13:39 GMT

From _The Corpse Had A Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat_ by Edna Buchanan (New York: Random House, 1987), p.157:

"The stories about drugs in Miami are also larger than life. So many are true that even the myth of the dead baby has become accepted as modern Miami-American folklore.

"Let's get this straight right here and now: There is no cocaine-stuffed dead baby, at least at this writing.

"The dead baby resurfaces frequently, reported as fact in otherwise responsible and prestigious -- and some not so responsible and prestigious -- publications. It has appeared on the front page of _The Washington Post_, in _Life_ magazine, and in the _National Enquirer_. The story, with minor variations, is that an alert customs official, or airlines employee on a Colombia-Miami flight noticed that a baby in the arms of a woman passenger did not look well. Closer scrutiny revealed that the baby was dead and its body stuffed with high-grade cocaine in an attempt to smuggle the drug into this country.

"The dead baby is reported at least once a year. Each time, I am one of the many reporters assigned to check it out. It is fiction. It did not happen. I have laid the dead baby to rest so often that I can now see its poor little pasty face in my mind's eye."

Edna Buchanan is the top crime reporter in the world, writing for the _Miami Herald_.

Steve "next week: rebuttal by Alice Cooper" Thornton


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