Mary Roach - Gulp

The medical staff at Avenal report that constipation is a common complaint.

THE ALIMENTARY CANAL is an accommodating criminal accomplice, but it has limits. The fuller the rectum and the longer you hold it back, the sooner the urge returns. Like a digital alarm clock, the more you ignore it, the bossier it gets. Twenty-four hours is about the limit for the average hooper. After that, Rodriguez says, “your brain just keeps telling you it wants to use the restroom.” I picture Rodriguez’s brain, desperate but polite, tapping him on the shoulder.

Swallowing contraband packets rather than hooping them buys the smuggler extra time. That’s one reason swallowing is the preferred carrying technique of the Latin American drug mule. Out of the 4,972 alimentary canal smugglers caught in Frankfurt and Paris airports between 1985 and 2002, only 312 had the goods packed in their rectum. Everyone else had swallowed it. Even on a ten-hour Bogotá–to–Los Angeles flight, swallowed packets typically don’t reach the rectum by the time the plane lands. Mules are instructed not to eat anything during the flight. In this way they avoid triggering mass movements of the colon. (They may also take antidiarrheal drugs that shut down peristaltic contractions.) Thus even a cavity search of a suspected “swallower” may fail to produce any evidence.

Swallowers present a legal conundrum in that border detentions are required by law to be brief. Agents may detain a suspected smuggler only long enough to search luggage—checked, carry-on, and anatomical—and confirm or refute their suspicions. In a case that turned the lowly defecation reflex into a matter of Supreme Court deliberation, Bogotá resident Rosa Montoya de Hernandez was held for sixteen hours by customs agents in the Los Angeles International Airport. A patdown and strip search had revealed a stiff abdomen—for Montoya de Hernandez’s gastrointestinal tract was packed with eighty-eight bags of cocaine—and two pairs of plastic underpants lined with paper towels. She was given a choice: agree to an X-ray or sit in a room with a garbage bag–lined wastebasket and a female customs agent charged with, as they say at Avenal, “panning for gold.” [71] Customs officers at Frankfurt Airport have it easier. Suspects are brought to the glass toilet, a specially designed commode with a separate tank for viewing and hands-free rinsing—kind of an amped-up version of the inspecting shelf on some German toilets. P.S.: The common assumption that the “trophy shelf” reflects a uniquely German fascination with excrement is weakened by the fact that older Polish, Dutch, Austrian, and Czech toilets also feature this design. I prefer the explanation that these are the sausage nations, and that prewar pork products caused regular outbreaks of intestinal worms.

Montoya de Hernandez refused the X-ray. She sat curled up in a chair, leaning to one side and exhibiting, to quote Court of Appeals documents, symptoms consistent with “heroic efforts to resist the usual calls of nature.”

Unfortunately for drug mules, the usual calls of nature are amplified by anxiety. Anxiety causes a mild contraction of the muscles of the rectum walls. This reduces the receptacle’s volume, which means it takes less filling to activate the stretch receptors and confer ye olde sense of urgency. Rodriguez confirms this: “You have to relax. If you’re nervous, your body clenches up.” (Even mild anxiety has this effect. Using rectal balloons and regretful volunteers, motility researcher William Whitehead found that anxious people tend to have, on average, smaller rectal volumes.) In an episode of markedly high anxiety—giving a speech, say, or smuggling heroin—the effect can be dramatic. It’s the last thing an “alimentary canal smuggler” needs. Mike Jones tells the story of a drug mule whose sphincter surrendered on a flight into O’Hare. The man retrieved the packets from the airplane toilet and, rather than wash them off and reswallow them, stuffed them into the socks he had on—with predictable and life-changing results.

Montoya de Hernandez’s lawyer tried, unsuccessfully, to argue that the plastic underpants and the eight recent passport stamps into and out of Miami and Los Angeles [72] Other red flags for customs agents include the unique breath odor created by gastric acid dissolving latex, and airline passengers who don’t eat. For years, Avianca cabin crew would take note of international passengers who refused meals, and report the names to customs personnel upon landing. did not constitute a clear indication that she was smuggling, and that her lengthy detention had been in violation of her Fourth Amendment rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, however, reversed the conviction. And on it went, until Montoya de Hernandez and her stalwart anus made their way to the highest court of the land. [73] Occasionally the justice system has no choice but to step right in it. In State of Iowa v. Steven Landis , an inmate was convicted of squirting a correctional officer with a feces-filled toothpaste tube, a violation of Iowa Code section 708.3B, “inmate assault—bodily fluids or secretions.” Landis appealed, contending that without expert testimony or scientific analysis of the officer’s soiled shirt, the court had failed to prove that the substance was in fact feces. The state’s case had been based on eyewitness, or in this case nosewitness, testimony from other correctional officers. When asked how he knew it was feces, one officer had told the jury, “It was a brown substance with a very strong smell of feces.” The appeals judge felt this was sufficient. My thanks to Judge Colleen Weiland, who drew my attention to the case and did me the favor of forwarding a logistical question to the presiding judge, Judge Mary Ann—may it please the author—Brown. “It appeared,” Brown replied, “that he liquefied the material and then dripped it or sucked it into the tube.” With Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall dissenting, the Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals judgment. By refusing an X-ray and resisting “the call of nature,” the Court concluded, Montoya de Hernandez was herself responsible for the duration and discomfort of her detention. The phrase “the call of nature” occurs so many times in the text of the case that I found myself applying a David Attenborough accent as I read.

United States v. Montoya de Hernandez set the precedent for the 1990 case of Delaney Abi Odofin, who spent twenty-four days in detention before passing the first of his narcotics-filled balloons. “An otherwise permissible border detention,” the Justia.com summary concluded, “does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment simply because a detainee’s intestinal fortitude leads to an unexpectedly long period of detention.”

How is such fortitude even possible? Why didn’t Odofin’s mass contractions seize the day? Why didn’t his colon burst? Whitehead explained that the body has yet another rupture-preventing protective mechanism. A rectum that remains distended long enough will eventually trigger a slowing or even a shutdown of the production line, all the way upstream to the stomach if need be. Contractions of the colon and small intestine wane, and gastric emptying slows. This mechanism was documented in a 1990 study in which twelve students at the University of Munich were paid to hold back as long as they could. To see, one, whether and how long it’s possible to suppress the urge, and, two, what happens when you do. The authors were impressed. “Volunteers succeeded in suppressing the urge to defecate to an amazing extent.” Having just read Odofin’s case, I wasn’t all that amazed. Only three of the twelve made it to the fourth day.