March 07, 2007
News you can use
Given the story yesterday about the Arab caught with a magnet, wires, and other suspicious objects stuck in his KeithOlberman, Slate resurrected its explainer, How many cell phones can you fit in your rear end?
Cellular telephones were discovered inside the anal cavities of four prison inmates in El Salvador on Tuesday. The director of the prison says the convicts had attempted to conceal four plastic-wrapped cell phones, nine cell-phone chips, and one cell-phone charger. Hang on—how much stuff can one person fit up there?
Quite a bit. "Body-packing" drug runners usually carry several pounds of narcotics in their digestive tracts. These are split up into dozens of tubular packets, each one about the size of an unshelled peanut. Most body-packers swallow the packets along with drugs that induce constipation, but some place the drugs directly into the anal canal.
Objects that can't be divided into small packages pose a bigger problem. In general, it takes a fair bit of training to conceal something that's more than a couple of inches in diameter. As a general rule, the medical literature on "retained colorectal foreign bodies" considers anything bigger a "large object." (Most modern cell phones wouldn't meet that definition. The Explainer's Motorola RAZR, for example, is only 2 inches wide and 3.75 inches long.)
Doctors find retained foreign bodies in both smugglers and recreational body-packers. One experienced pleasure-seeker told an online body modification magazine that it took two years of training before he could accommodate a wine bottle—which is about three inches wide. (Now he can handle 4-inch balls.)
Body-packing can be a dangerous activity. In extreme cases, internal lacerations can lead to sepsis or fatal blood loss. Drug mules can suffer from "cocaine-packer syndrome," which occurs when packages break open and release their contents. (A ruptured packet of cocaine or heroin can be life-threatening; leaking marijuana or hashish is more likely to make you a bit loopy.) A retained foreign body can also cause severe abdominal pain.
"Recreational body packers"? Oy vey.
A high-school buddy did his medical internship at Lenox Hills Hospital in Manhattan; he told me that the attending physician delighted in showing newbies x-rays of patients' lower gastro-intestinal tracts, to see how well they could divine the contents of the junk in the trunk.
Leo said he stared at the x-ray for some time, mystified by what he was seeing. The attending finally snorted derisively, asking, "Whatsamatter, you don't recognize Mrs. Butterworth?"
Upon closer inspection, Leo saw that the patient had crammed an entire maid-shaped glass bottle of pancake topping into his bundt-cake pan.
Interesting, huh?
The security implications are actually pretty serious, as grenades will fit -- as well as bomb-making materials. Given the willingness of suicide bombers to strap explosives to the outsides of their bodies, it's inevitable that they'll soon start exploiting our squeamishness and use fundament-exploiting tactics.
Posted by Mike Lief at March 7, 2007 07:20 PM
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