YES She has behaved with incredible stupidity, but 20-year-old girls do. It's called growing up and some young women, especially those who have led cossetted lives, take longer getting on with it than others. Smith seems to have been bright on paper - she was named student of the year at her catering college 18 months ago - but when it comes to real life, the only thing she seems capable of cooking is her own goose.
The basic facts of her story are perfectly plausible. Even the Thai police admit that there are gangs of Pakistani drug dealers who frequent Bangkok's Khaosarn Road because that's where the dopey, in all senses of the word, backpackers hang out. Since her arrest, a story has surfaced that Smith was chucked out of her job at Joe Banana's for having illict puffs of cannabis. Leaving aside the interesting question of whether working at JB's is already proof of a deeply immature personality, I think most people (including the president of the United States) would agree that there's a difference between inhaling and exporting.
Anyway, Smith claims not to have suspected that she was carrying four kilogrammes of hashish and 565 amphetamine pills. A nice, friendly man gave her a ticket to Tokyo and some spending money, and asked her to pass on a message to his dear friend. You and I might smell a particularly stinky rodent, but Smith had already been given one free ticket to Thailand, by her wealthy father; I suspect that blithely hopping around Asia has been so much a part of her life that she hasn't more than a half-baked clue how much such jaunts cost.
And, though I'm sorry to say it, I think female vanity has a good deal to do with this mess. When a man in a bar tells you that you're pretty and wonderful - well, it takes a strong will not to begin preening and prancing in his spotlight. It's just one further mental step to believe that free tickets are actually your right as a truly special woman. The police haven't yet traced 'Hassan' but I bet he's a first-class charmer. Nor do I think it a coincidence that it's nearly always foolish, vain young women who end up as drug mules. Lisa Marie Smith will not be the last one, no matter how many warnings the Thai authorities issue: you can't warn people against their own egos.
Idiocy and arrogance are not character recommendations, but neither are they worth 20 years of life in prison, a span which really is a lifetime to Smith. In the last two decades she may not have picked up as valuable a lesson as the one she learned in about two minutes at Bangkok airport. Maybe the Thai authorities will be lenient with her shame. One policeman who saw her in prison now describes her as 'naa taek' - broken faced.
NO Lisa Marie Smith has more chance of convincing me she is Lisa Marie Presley than of getting me to believe her story. Naive? Yes - stupid, even. But her story just does not hold together.