The other thing the Munich researchers reported, and a mild duh here: the longer the material was held back, the harder and more pellet-like—the more scybalous—it became. Because as long as it sits in the tube, moisture will keep on being absorbed from it. The harder and drier the waste gets, the tougher it is to eject. Holding it in causes constipation. The authors concluded their work with a word of advice for constipates (to use the exotic and rarely employed noun form): “Follow each call to the stool.” Or, in the words of a British physician quoted in Inner Hygiene, James Whorton’s excellent and scholarly* history of constipation, “Allow nothing short of fire or endangered life to induce you to resist . . . nature’s alvine? call.”
Constipation is the least of an alimentary canal smuggler’s worries. About 6 percent of drug mules suffer bowel blockages? when packets logjam or the ends of the condoms become entangled. And there are overdoses. In the early days of alimentary canal smuggling, mules would wrap drugs in single condoms or fingers of rubber gloves, a thickness sometimes dissolved clear through after a few hours in gastric acid. Depending on the quality of the latex, the drugs would also leach through intact packaging. In more than half the reported cases of cocaine-swallowers spanning 1975 to 1981, the suspect died of overdose. (An antidote exists for heroin, but not cocaine.) Insult to injury: should you die on the job, you run the risk of your accomplices gutting your carcass to recover the drugs,* as happened to two of the ten dead Miami-Dade County, Florida, drug mules whose cases were covered in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology paper “Fatal Heroin Body Packing.”
At Avenal, drugs are typically hooped rather than swallowed. Parks’s unit regularly intercepts illegal narcotics, as well as an evolving assortment of prescription drugs. (Wellbutrin, Xanax, Adderall, and Vicodin are snorted for various off-label recreational effects. The Rogaine that appeared in a recent over-the-fence drop appears to have been sought for its intended purpose.) Rodriguez has had cell mates who’ve opted to swallow. Two died of overdose. “One, he had like six months left. I go, ‘Don’t do it, man, you’re too close to the house.’”
I ask Rodriguez how close he is to the house. Dumb question. Rodriguez is in for life. I had assumed the killing was gang-related, but it was over a girl. “It wasn’t even my girl.” Rodriguez rubs his thigh and looks away briefly, acknowledging something long past but still sharp. “I’m not the kid I was when I came in.” That was twenty-seven years ago. “I’m starting to get white hairs, man. I’m starting to go bald.” He lowers his head, to show me the bald spot or to register shame, I’m not sure which.
I don’t know what to say. I like Rodriguez, but I don’t like murder. “Dude,” I finally manage. “Was that Rogaine yours?”
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HERE IS ANOTHER reason so many drug mules prefer to swallow contraband, despite the risk of an overdose. “The rectum is taboo across many of the regions where mules originate. In the Caribbean and Latin America, any use of the cavity is automatically associated with homosexuality, which can still lead to a fatal beating in many communities.” This is from an e-mail from Mark Johnson, of the UK firm rather hazily known as TRMG, or The Risk Management Group.
The rectal taboo is equally strong among Islamic terrorists. Johnson’s colleague Justin Crump, CEO of the London firm Sibylline, told me about the suicide bomber who tried to kill Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Muhammad bin Nayef in his home in Jidda in August 2009. Since little remained of the bomber’s lower torso, the location of the explosives became an item of fizzy speculation among terrorists and counterterror experts. “All the jihadist websites were saying it was a swallowed device, that he had it in his stomach.” Crump believes it was simply taped in place behind the bomber’s scrotum.
“What was interesting,” said Crump of the web postings, “was that there was a massive reluctance to say it could have been stuffed up his bottom.” He recalls examining photographs of the bombing aftermath with a source of his, a former Al Qaeda militant. “He was saying, ‘Oh, yeah, look at the way his arms came off. Definitely swallowed, definitely swallowed.’ He was really keen to head off any notion that . . .” Here Crump himself seemed to trip over the taboo. “. . . To head off the other option.”
No recorded instance exists of a suicide bomb being concealed inside a terrorist’s digestive tract. Swallowing or hooping explosives, as opposed to wearing them in a vest, would reduce the destructive potential by a factor of five or ten, Crump says, because the bomber’s body absorbs most of the blast. Bin Nayef was no more than a few feet away from an explosive the size of a grenade, but because the bomber was squatting on it, the target walked away without serious injury.