A young man arrested by police for cocaine possession was taken to an emergency department in Geneva, Switzerland, where a CT scan appeared to confirm what officers suspected. His stomach held multiple round objects of similar appearance, and the on-call radiologist reported them as compatible with swallowed drug pellets.
They were balls of fufu, a starchy staple eaten across West and Central Africa that is traditionally rolled into small portions and swallowed without chewing. Doctors from University Hospitals of Geneva described the mix-up in a case report titled "Don't chew the fufu," first published in the open research platform F1000Research in 2019 and revised after peer review in 2021.
