Rodriguez was ordered to smuggle—from work detail into the prison—four wrapped metal blades, a package twelve inches long and two inches fat. If he refused, he was told, one of the blades would be used on him. It was a harrowing experience, but he managed it. Since then, he has mainly hooped tobacco. “If you’re going to go to the hole”—the other hole, solitary confinement—“you wrap up your tobacco, your lighter, matches . . .”* In the air, Rodriguez traces the outline of the smoking kit. It strikes me as far larger than one of Shafik’s balloons. I explain rectal stretch receptors and the defecation reflex. “Are you always having to fight to hold it in?” I have an awareness that I must seem like an unusual person.
“Eeeh, yeah but . . .” Rodriguez looks at the ceiling, as though searching for the right phrasing, or beseeching God to intervene. “It finds its spot.” In physiological terms, the defecation reflex has been aborted. After a certain number of aborts, the body gets the message and backs off for a while.
Gut motility experts will tell you that things happen to people who habitually abort the urge to go. Most are not smugglers. They’re what gastroenterologist Mike Jones calls the “one more thing crowd.” “They need to go, but they’ve got to do one more thing first.” Or they are “bathroom-averse”; they’re reluctant to use public restrooms because someone might hear or smell them, or because they’re anxious about germs. By continually aborting the urge, these people may inadvertently train themselves to do the opposite of what nature intended. Their automatic response to “the urge”—even in the privacy of their home—is to tighten up. The medical term is paradoxical sphincter contraction. You’re pushing on the door at the same time you’re holding it shut. It’s a common cause of chronic constipation.* And one that all the fiber in the world won’t cure.
“You can figure out these folks really easily,” Jones says. “You stick your finger in their rectum and you go, ‘Okay, push,’ and you feel them clamp down.”
A group of German constipation researchers point out that “untoward conditions during the anorectal examination”—e.g., a stranger has his finger up there—can incite the anal sphincter to contract. Thus paradoxical sphincter contraction can be an artifact of diagnostic exams.? Though the authors acknowledge that for some patients, paradoxical sphincter contraction is assuredly the cause of their woes.
The medical staff at Avenal report that constipation is a common complaint.
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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.”*