A Capacious Body Cavity and Some Questions

A small story from the Columbia Tribune in Missouri caught my attention this morning. "Cavity Search Turns Up Mixture of Drugs," was the headline. A gentleman was busted by the cops and arrested "after police conducted a cavity search and found a mixture of drugs hidden inside his body." It was quite a haul: Roughly eight ounces of powder cocaine, crack, ecstasy pills, and marijuana. I'll leave the jokes for others, but I am curious about a couple of things: Dude, how do you shove eight ounces of dope up your rectum? And more seriously: Just what were the circumstances around this search and arrest? This newspaper articles—all three paragraphs of it—is typical of drug bust reporting. The reporters take what the cops give them and leave it at that. If I had been that beat reporter, I would have had plenty of questions: What caused police to stop this person in the first place? What caused them to search him? What caused them to do a body cavity search? How often and in what circumstances do they do such searches? And the question the cops should be asked on every self-congratulatory news release or press conference announcing yet another drug bust: Is this going to make the slightest bit of difference?