mistaken positive in a drugs test carried out at Barajas Airport in Madrid has resulted in a Panamanian doctor, Juan Rodríguez Lizondro, to be imprisoned in Madrid for six months. The customs authorities and Guardia Civil declared that his 19 kilos of clothes had been impregnated with cocaine, while the doctor claimed they had detected his grandmother’s camphor. The reported conversation at the time was.... ‘It smells strange – what’s it got?’ ‘I don’t know. I live with my grandmother. She irons my clothes with starch, and then puts it in drawers with balls of camphor ro repel the moths – maybe it’s that’. ‘Let’s see’, said the Guardia Civil, who then sprayed the clothes with an aerosol which produced a distinctive blue colour, indicating as far as they were concerned that it was cocaine. The 34 year old doctor, who is a Seventh Day Adventist, had come to Madrid because of a three month scholarship he had won with the Carlos III Health Institute. He did not drink or smoke, much less take drugs. Despite that the prosecutor called for him to be charged with drug trafficking and the judge, who considered the aerosol test could not be wrong on 108 different items of clothing. A second test on the clothing at the Spanish Medicaments Agency took six months to come up with the correct result showing that there were no drugs. ‘I came to Spain with all my dreams and a grand project, and everything turned into the worst nightmare’.
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