Drug users or dealers may find this tough to swallow, but a new study shows that the practice of gobbling down the evidence to avoid arrest or prosecution can be more hazardous than they think.

In a UCSF study of patients who were seen in the emergency department at San Francisco General Hospital between January 1993 and April 1995, 18 percent of 98 cases of crack cocaine "body stuffers" were found to have suffered adverse symptoms.

The researchers found that 54 percent of the patients had symptoms of irregular heartbeat, 20 percent had abdominal pain, and four percent had seizures. Other symptoms included chest pain (14 percent) and hypertension/high blood pressure (23 percent), while 15 percent required sedation because they were agitated.

The study is published in the May 1997 issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.Body stuffers is the term used for persons who swallow packets of drugs without specifically preparing the packets for the gastrointestinal tract, as opposed to "body packers" who prepare the packets appropriately. According to the researchers, body stuffers often swallow the drugs unwrapped or wrapped in plastic sandwich bags, balloons, condoms, paper or aluminum foil which results in "leaks" into the intestinal tract.

Cocaine is the most common drug involved in the body stuffing syndrome, the researchers said. The most effective wrapping for drug ingestion among body stuffers was a condom, which didn't allow leakage.

"Most crack cocaine body stuffers absorb the poorly wrapped drug, and many have symptoms, usually within two hours of ingesting the cocaine," said Karl Sporer, MD, UCSF assistant professor of surgery at the UCSF-affiliated San Francisco General Hospital. However, most of the symptoms are relatively benign, Sporer said, with the exception of the four percent who suffer seizures.

By Alice Trinkl

1st appeared 5/7/97