Poverty and a global drug trade meet in the Philippines, where international syndicates increasingly recruit women to carry narcotics across borders. Al Jazeera's 101 East travels the country to find out why, tracking the numbers behind the trend: more than 690 Filipinos sit in foreign jails on drug charges, 227 of them in China alone, with 85 facing death sentences. The film lays out how the smuggling actually works, women paid between $500 and $5,000 to swallow drug-filled tubes, pack them in luggage, or carry them dissolved into paper and books. Labour rights advocates interviewed describe the economic pressure driving these choices, noting that a quarter of Filipinos live on less than a dollar a day and a tenth of the population works overseas to support family back home. The film sets these individual stories against the scale of the industry itself, now estimated at $8.4 billion, asking how a country built on exporting labor ended up exporting couriers for an illegal trade instead.