‘Prison for drug smuggling made me who I am now’: Michaella McCollum on life after the Peru Two

She became famous as a drug mule with a memorable hairstyle – but what has Michaella McCollum learned from being jailed for attempted cocaine smuggling in 2013?

On 6 August 2013, two 20-year-old women were arrested at Jorge Chavez International Airport in Lima, Peru. Michaella McCollum and Melissa Reid’s luggage contained £1.5m worth of cocaine.

Michaella had been convinced to attempt to smuggle the drugs from Peru to Spain by a man she met in Ibiza. Michaella and Melissa hadn’t known each other prior to being paired up by the criminals arranging the cocaine’s journey. Both pleaded guilty to drug smuggling and were sentenced to over six years’ imprisonment in the notorious Ancon 2 jail.

In 2016, both women were granted early release, and since then, Michaella has been vocal about her story, and how she’s changed since she became known as the drug smuggler with the giant bun in her hair. In a new, five-part documentary, Michaella, now 28 and a mother of two, narrates her journey into – and out of – crime, and here, she tells BBC Three in her own words what life’s been like since.

"When people ask how I feel about it now, it feels like I’m thinking about a different person – I can’t relate to that person now. How was I like that? I just accepted things I didn’t feel comfortable with, but felt too shy to say anything about. Those three years in prison did so much to make me the person I am now, with the mindset and morals I have now.

"My feelings on using drugs have massively changed. When I was around drugs at the time in Ibiza, I didn’t think it was a big deal. It was my first holiday alone and I was thinking about having a good time. I didn’t do any research, I didn’t think of the harm that could come to me or people around me. Now I’m like, ‘those things I put into my body without question, how am I still alive?’ It’s really scary when you think about it. If anything happened to me, what would happen to my children? Becoming a parent changed me as well – when I was younger, I was using drugs as an escape from reality. I think it’s really important for us to think about that, and parents to educate their children as well. I wish we had more drug education at school, or my family were more educated to teach me, and I would’ve been a bit more scared.

"I was very naive when I was 19. I didn’t think anything bad could happen to me. I didn’t suspect people, I just had this fairytale of an unrealistic world, which is quite different from how I see it now. I grew up thinking I could trust people, I never questioned things, I just believed everything and trusted people way too easily. We shouldn’t be like that, not everybody has got your best intentions, strangers don’t care about you. You do need to be a bit suspicious of people and have your guard up. It’s about listening to your gut feeling – I had a gut feeling it was wrong, and I ignored it. Your body always knows something is off.

"The alarm bells didn’t start to ring until I was getting ready to go to Peru. I’d flown from Ibiza to Majorca really high [on drugs], and I just thought it was an adventure. It was only when I started to sober up that I thought, 'oh my god, what the heck am I doing?'

"I was alone when I got to Peru, and I realised how deep this was. I didn’t know how to get myself out of it. I don’t know if it’s true that people were watching me all the time, but I really believed that, I think we were being watched at all times. I’d tried to tell them – the cartel members we met – my fears, and said I don’t think this is going to work, and they’d said it wasn’t a big deal, that I was overthinking things. I started to question myself, thinking, is it normal for me to be questioning this? Any time I brought up these feelings it was pushed away, like 'you're really young, you're just being dramatic'. It was like, mind games. I was scared of what might happen to me if I did try and walk away.

"It was actually being in prison that made me start to stand up for myself more, but even that took a couple of years there for me to feel secure enough to stand up for myself and not let people take advantage of me. I feel like my experience in prison was over-glamorised by the press – they missed the point of why I wanted to start running a beauty salon there, and become the delegate (the prisoner who liaises with prison authorities). It was to prove to myself that I could stand up for myself, and I wanted to push myself to do that.

"Ah, yes, my hair. I didn’t know for a while that it became a meme – I just put my hair up quickly on the way to the airport, it was really early and I hadn’t slept. I didn’t have access to water to wash it, and when I was transferred from the holding cell to prison and got to speak to my family, they were like, 'what’s going on with your hair, everyone’s talking about your bun!' It was funny. Then all the prisoners wanted their hair like that, they’d say, 'Michaella’s hair!' I guess that kind of up-do wasn’t something they’d seen before.

"It was really hard getting back to normal. When I first got home, everything felt so normal, it was like I’d only been there yesterday. But I didn’t feel normal any more. I didn’t feel like the person that they knew. Everybody knew who I was and what I’d done, and I was afraid of the judgement. I’m not an awful, dangerous person. I had jobs, but I never made it through more than one shift – they'd say I got too much attention and they’d have to let me go.

"One guy interviewing me said, 'I know who you are, I know what you’ve done, are you definitely done with that? You’re not trafficking anymore?' The first university I applied to accepted me, but then withdrew my application because they said I could be a danger to their young students. I felt so downhearted.

"When I got back home, I wanted to study criminology. When I was in prison we’d have psychologists coming in, and everytime I spoke to them I just felt they didn’t understand, how could they possibly understand? I felt like it would be good for me to do something like that because I can relate to how they’re feeling, and how they might feel when they come out, but I can also help them see it doesn’t have to define them and you can get to a better place. I applied to study criminology at uni, but I struggled, it felt too close to home. So I switched – I’m now doing business with Spanish and Mandarin.

"Spain is where I'd ultimately like to be. It's a different way of life, it's more relaxed. I can meet people there who don’t know who I am, and I really miss that. I know the stuff that happened there was bad, but I love the culture and the language, and taking my kids there. I want my children to be cultured and to see the world, so when they get to the age or 19 or 29, they'll have travelled and be more aware, they'll hopefully have the life skills I didn't have at 19. I want them to have the things I feel I needed growing up."

As told to Thea de Gallier

High: Confessions of an Ibiza Drug Mule is on BBC iPlayer now