Every now and again, a news story hits headlines that seems custom-made to scare the young, as if parents have banded together to create a new bogeyman once every few years. Something bad will befall a young woman – they are usually women – and give a whole generation nightmares. For those of a certain age, those who were in their teens and twenties early in the Noughties, Michaella McCollum and Melissa Reid were those women. Convinced to board a plane to Lima and return with a drug haul, they were caught at the airport, arrested and imprisoned. In the UK, they were derided as silly girls who should have known better. But there was more to the story: they were not guilt-free, but they had been manipulated and misled by men who even now have never suffered any consequences. They eventually left jail and headed home, and while Melissa closed the door to her regrettable legacy, Michaella has kept if firmly ajar. First, via a 2018 memoir You’ll Never See Daylight Again, and now High: Confessions of an Ibiza Drug Mule, a riveting new documentary exploring her story.
‘I’m nervous,’ Michaella tells Grazia a few days before the show makes its debut. She has spent much of lockdown working on the show, while busy with university work. ‘It’s nerve-racking: I’ve talked openly about something that was really bad in my life, so it’s put me in a vulnerable position: the world is going to see my pain and all of that bad stuff. But ultimately, I hope it’s going to get a good response and have some form of value.’
It would be completely natural for Michaella, from Northern Ireland, to follow Melissa’s lead and simply never speak of her years in a South American jail ever again. But the experience was, for her, so impactful that she felt the need to dissuade others from ever inadvertently following her path.
‘I agreed with the documentary before my book was released, she explains, ‘two or three years ago. I felt like I could reach a certain amount of people with the book, and then I felt like a documentary’s reach would be even higher. I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anybody else. I don’t want young people to be in those type of positions, I want to bring that awareness, to open people's eyes to the dangers.’
Michaella was working as a bar in Ibiza when she was convinced to fly to mainland Spain to smuggle drugs. There was a change of plan, and she was sent to Lima without knowing where it was. Sentenced to six years in jail, they were let out after three. But three years in jail is not a short stint. She compartmentalised.
‘Sometimes, I told myself that it was ok,’ she recalls. ‘Nothing was ok, but I had to tell myself that. We do that, to get us through situations. But I can choose to look at things that came from it: I learned another language, and about another culture. But obviously that came with a heavy price.’ Back home, she and Melissa were figures of fun. People dressed as them for Halloween. She had to use countermeasures to make sure the mockery didn’t become yet another trauma as she lay in her cell.
‘I had disagreements with my family when I went to prison,’ she remembers. ‘They were telling me stories about home and what people were saying. But I didn’t I want to know. Because I had no control over that. I thought “why am I here, anxious, depressed, crying, thinking about all the terrible things people were talking about”’ It put me in a bad mental state. So I closed my eyes to it.’
She does not judge or blame Melissa for not wanting to partake in documentaries or books. But, for her, it’s the best way to deal with things. ‘I hold my hands up and accept that I made a mistake,’ she says. ‘That took a long time for me. But I felt like it was important to say that. That you can mess up. I made a big mistake. But we can become better, and you can make something good, no matter how bad. It's important to forgive yourself, and understand that the person who you were at that time made that decision. We’re human. We’re not born with a script.’
‘I had actually people that have messaged me on social media after the book and they had been asked to do what I had done,’ she finishes. ‘Seeing what happened to me stops people from making those mistakes: I hope that it does kind of ring a bell, or triggers something in them, to look at their situation and remove themselves out of it.’
The story of the Peru Two was front page news for a few days. Interest faded in the weeks that followed. Then, when the hysteria faded, they were a distant memory. But there were still two young women, going to sleep every night in a prison cell, because they made a single enormous mistake. For Michaella, it’s about time the world had a reminder.
When is High on TV?
All 5 episodes of High: Confessions of an Ibiza Drug Mule will be on iPlayer on July 4th.
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