Six years ago, a pair of Quebec influencers were arrested for attempting to smuggle $30 million of cocaine into Australia. Today, they’re at the centre of Amazon Prime’s latest original film Sugar, a fictionalized tale about how they went from tourist party girls to drug mules.
In 2016, Melina Roberge and Isabelle Lagacé boarded a luxurious Australian cruise ship with suitcases filled with cocaine. Things took a sour turn when police dogs located the cocaine in their cabin. Roberge then admitted that she had agreed to smuggle the drugs into Australia in exchange for a free lavish vacation that she could post about on social media.
Roberge and Lagacé were both convicted in 2018 and subsequently released in 2021 when they decided to return home to Montreal.
The movie isn’t a total recreation of the events that transpired in Australia. According to the Montreal Gazette, the film doesn’t exactly abide by the details in which the arrests occurred.
In October, CTV’s Maya Johnson spoke to Roberge who explained some of the difficulties she encountered in adapting to regular life after being released from prison.
“There’s no way I’m going to struggle,” Roberge told Johnson, thinking she would be able to return to her previous life easily. “I’m just going to go back to work and everything’s going to be fine. But of course, when you live in jail there are certain things that you can’t say. If you’re frustrated about certain things, you can’t talk about it. You basically have to keep your emotions to yourself. So I think what I did was bottle up a lot of things while I was there, and when I came back, I just did the same thing. So the transition was quite hard.”
Sugar is available to stream today on Amazon Prime Video.
