Originally Posted by
Stewie Mac
OP - you're over-thinking this whole trip.
Looking at the
SA customs website , it seems clear to me that you will be bringing in medicine in 'sufficient quantities for three months for own personal treatment accompanied by a letter or certified prescription from a registered physician', which is expressly called out as excluded from needing declaration.
Therefore you don't need to declare them, and you don't need to fill in a travellers card, and you don't need to go through the red channel.
If you normally decant all your drugs into one pack, why is this any different? You have the same risk that law enforcement will challenge you as to what all the drugs are, but clearly you have decided that the downside of mixing drugs (time delay while each pill is checked for legality) is outweighed by upside in convenience.... South Africa is no different.
And don't sweat the laptop bag/handbag thing. I regularly take a stuffed laptop bag on as second personal item on JNB-DUR/CPT flights without issue.
Agreed. As a local resident I have never been stopped to check my meds. And whenever I travel to other countries, as a matter of course, I keep a copy of the prescription, and on the rare occasions that I have been stopped, the script has been sufficient. These guys are looking for kilograms of stuff, not a few blister packs of tablets.
At JNB, you may encounter a buffoon at Agricultural Control who may want to check for honey, cheese or salami. This happened to me a few weeks ago when my Qatar flight landed around the same time as Swiss. He assumed I came from Zurich and demanded that he search my luggage for cheese and salami. When I explained that my flight was from Doha and that cheese is not exactly available there
and that being in the Middle East, the chances of getting salami was even more remote, I showed him my luggage tags and turned around and walked off. (I was not in a good mood that morning, and in fact I was coming back from Cyprus armed with olive oil and other tasty goodies).
Enjoy your trip.