A new drug

[little fella]

I had one of those email warning messages today about a new drug, I googled it and found that it is true. Rife in Columbia at the moment and I dont know of it over here but there again like most other things we are bound to get the problem.

 

Burundanga

 

There seems to be a new moral panic percolating through the blogosphere, this time about a mind-control date-rape zombie-making plant called borrachero, or burundanga, or devil's breath ? "the world's most sinister drug." Under its influence, we are told, you remain lucid and articulate yet absolutely compliant to any suggestion. When you awaken, you have no recollection of what has happened. Colorless, odorless, and tasteless, the drug is slipped into drinks and sprinkled onto food. Victims become so docile that they help thieves rob their homes and empty their bank accounts. Women have been drugged repeatedly over days, gang-raped or rented out as prostitutes, or convinced to willingly give up their own children.

 

This drug is scopolamine, and the plant it comes from is any of the Colombian Brugmansia species, often called to? in Per? or borrachero in Colombia, which we have discussed here. Now to? is indeed a powerful sacred plant, with strong hallucinogenic and other effects, almost all of them unpleasant. But I think that what we are seeing in these stories is a recycling of an urban legend, and a sacred plant is getting a bum rap.

 

Apparently, these stories began circulating in 1995, with an article attributed to the Wall Street Journal. "It seems that everyone in Bogota knows someone who has been victimized by the drug," the article said. "In one common scenario, a person will be offered a soda or drink laced with the substance. The next the person remembers is waking up miles away, extremely groggy and with no memory of what happened. People soon discover that they have handed over jewelry, money, car keys, and sometimes have even made multiple bank withdrawals for the benefit of their assailants. Because burundanga is often given at seedy bars or houses of prostitution, many victims are reluctant to come forward."

 

According to stories circulating at the time, in the mid-1990s Colombia was, as described in a later article in The Guardian, "in the grip of a crime wave caused by the use of a plant drug known locally as burundanga. The substance was implicated in hundreds of robberies, rapes and murders. According to doctors at Kennedy Hospital in Bogota, around 20 victims a week were being admitted to their emergency ward with no recollection of what had happened to them ? a sure sign that, presumably by accepting a drink or a candy from a stranger, they had become unwitting victims of 'the tree that drives people mad.'"

 

In some of these cases, we are told, these burundanga casualties were not just the victims of crimes, but also their perpetrators. A senator and his wife reported that, presumably under its influence, they had spent a night withdrawing huge amounts of money from cash dispensers and handing it to a gang of thieves. A well-known diplomat vanished for three days only to reappear at Santiago airport in Chile, in the company of a woman he didn't know, carrying a suitcase full of cocaine.

 

The burundanga story was revived in 2003 by an apparent Reuters dispatch from Bogot?, under the attention-catching headline Drug Turns Crime Victims Into Zombies. The story begins with this compelling lede:

The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus. Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten and her son was gone. Fernandez is just one of hundreds of victims every month who, according to Colombian hospitals, are temporarily turned into zombies by a home-grown drug called scopolamine which has been embraced by thieves and rapists.

 

And making the rounds now, on the eve of 2008, is a a nine-part documentary about burundanga produced by online broadcast network VBS, entitled Colombian Devil's Breath ? "the most dangerous drug in the world." The station ? whose creative head is Spike Jonze, director of Being John Malkovich ? sent two hip young reporters down to Colombia to try and score some burundanga. One of them stands in the jungle and tells us that scopolamine is "the worst roofie you can ever imagine, times a million." The reporter continues, "You are at the whim of suggestions like, hey, take me to your ATM, hey, come with me to the hotel room, while you are completely conscious and articulate." The first part of the series is here:

 

 

The drug is said to be administered in several ways. A man will approach you asking for directions, and show you a piece of paper on which the address is written. But the folded paper actually contains powdered burundanga, which the man blows in your face, rendering you powerless. Not surprisingly, this is exactly the method of administration depicted for the zombie powder tetrodotoxin in the Wes Craven movie The Serpent and the Rainbow. The plant can be put in a drink, in chewing gum, in candy. It is said that a prostitute will put burundanga on her nipples in order to drug a customer ? itself an urban legend, apparently ultimately derived from the pilot episode of CSI, in which a prostitute dies from dermal absorption of scopolamine on her nipples. Series character Greg Sanders says, "No, it's scopolamine. It's a chemical used for motion sickness.... One drop of this stuff and she's out cold."

 

There are several reasons to be skeptical of these stories.

 

First, the effects of scopolamine overdose are quite well known. Clinical signs and symptoms are those of the typical peripheral anticholinergic syndrome seen in any atropine poisoning ? dilated pupils, dry mucous membranes, rapidly beating heart, fever, flushed dry skin, urinary retention, confusion, disorientation, and hallucinations. Rarely seizures occur, and sometimes there are tactile hallucinations, such as crawling insects. Indeed, medical students have a mnemonic for this syndrome: blind as a bat, hot as a hare, dry as a bone, red as a beet, and mad as a hatter. Patients are often amnesiac for events between ingestion and recovery. Fatalities are rare, but have been reported in children. Sometimes urinary retention is so severe as to require catheterization.

 

Here are two examples, both from the same emergency room. A young man who had ingested Datura straemonium, rich in scopolamine, was admitted with agitation, delirium with persecutory ideation, and frightening hallucinations of being assaulted by animals. Similarly, a young woman, who had ingested the same plant, was agitated, with delirium, anxiety, auditory hallucinations, and frightening visual and tactile hallucination of green turtles walking on her. In both cases, the patients were restrained and treated with the antipsychotic drug cyamemazine, and both returned to normal after 36 and 40 hours, respectively.

 

Now, it is certainly true that people can do very weird and self-destructive things after ingesting scopolamine, especially if they are young, na?ve, unprepared, and unattended; a collection of horror stories is here. But it is difficult to see these emergency room patients as being the sort of person a criminal would want to accompany into a bank.

 

Note, too, that both patients required restraint. Indeed, one of the problems in managing cases of scopolamine overdose is that the patient is combative rather than compliant. Hospitalization is often required ? some say always required ? for such agitated and combative behavior. A vivid self-report of a scopolamine overdose is found here; the paranoid hallucinations and aggressive behavior ? the author reports having severely bitten a police officer ? are far from the goofily compliant behavior of the burundanga stories.

 

Second, if burundanga worked so well, then we wouldn't be having all these arguments about waterboarding terrorism suspects. We would simply give them scopolamine and ask them, very nicely, what they were planning on doing next week, and could they please give us a look at their laptops. But scopolamine ? along with barbiturates, sodium thiopental, and ordinary alcohol ? has been thoroughly tested as a "truth serum," and it doesn't work. As Chris Suellentrop pointed out in an article in Slate, "So-called truth serums lower your inhibitions, and as a result you may become chattier but not necessarily more truthful. Losing your inhibitions isn't the same as losing your self-control.... If a terrorist has something he wants to get off his chest, he may be more apt to tell you about it while drunk or drugged. But you might learn about his propensity to wear his mother's burqa when he was a child, or his sinful crush on Madonna, and not his plan to blow up the Eiffel Tower. Or he may tell you lies, or he may tell you nothing at all."

 

The article in The Guardian, referred to above, puts it this way: "The idea that any chemical agent can be used to programme unwitting subjects to act against their will is regarded by most professional specialists as fiction." Even the fictitious drug hyoscine-pentothal, used by agent Jack Bauer for interrogation purposes in the television series 24, apparently works by causing intense pain rather than by inducing stuporous compliance. And I do not think that a powerful hallucinogen ? one that makes you believe, for example, that green turtles are crawling on you ? can be called a truth serum in any event.

 

Third, we should bear in mind that many urban legends center on eating or drinking things that have been contaminated by the feared other. In the Upper Amazon, for example, some of the tension between mestizos and Indians is reflected in the concept of cungatuya, a potentially fatal sickness which slowly closes the throat of the patient, until the person is unable to speak, eat, or drink. It is caused by a sorcerer sending a mashu, bat, to drop its phlegm or saliva into water which the victim then unknowingly drinks; the bat phlegm or saliva turns into worms that cause wounds in the victim?s throat, and which must removed by a shaman sucking them out. In San Mart?n, according to anthropologist Fran?oise Barbira-Freedman, the mestizos believe that this sickness is spread by Indians; and at feasts, weddings, and markets, mestizos warn each other about watching for phlegm in shared glassware. As in other contexts with which we may be more familiar ? drinking fountains and bus seats, for example ? the other is viewed as a source of dangerous contamination.

 

Fourth, some of these stories are ... well, fishy. A man goes into what the Wall Street Journal calls a "seedy bar or house of prostitution," and then has to explain to his wife why his cash is all gone. A well-known diplomat has to explain a lost weekend, a woman not his wife, and a suitcase full of cocaine. As The Guardian puts it, some claims of brainwashing "are better understood in terms of disinhibition which causes people to act in ways that they later regret." Such stories remind me of this line from Ghostbusters II, when a woman being interviewed by Bill Murray tells him, "I was sitting at the bar alone, and this alien approached me. He started talking to me, he bought me a drink. And then he must have used some kind of a ray or a mind control device because he forced me to follow him to his room and that's where he told me about the end of the world."

 

For example, the Wall Street Journal article tells the story of an architect named David Meneses. One Friday night, Mr. Meneses stopped at a pharmacy to buy antacid. He says that two well-dressed men approached his car, and the last thing he remembers is one of them unwrapping a piece of candy. "I woke up the next day at noon at my house," he says, with no memory of how he got there. On Monday, Mr. Meneses says that he checked with his bank, and he was told that his ATM card had made thirteen withdrawals for a total of about $700 on that Friday night. The doorman in his building said that he had seen Mr. Meneses come in at 7:00 a.m. looking "nervous and confused." Three days later, Mr. Meneses noticed that he had a flat tire. Two men on the street approached him and offered to change it. He remembers that they gave him something to drink ? and he drank it. "I can't imagine why," he says. Police found him asleep in his car six hours later. He said that he had been robbed of his radio and about $125. He blames burundanga for both incidents.

 

Still, despite my skepticism, there is every reason to be careful. There really is some nasty stuff out there ? real date-rape drugs such as gamma-hydroxybutyric acid and flunitrazepam. If you are looking for a little action in Medellin, be at least as careful as you are ? I hope ? in Chicago.

[Mary]

Scopolamine, also known as hyoscine and "Devils Breath", is a tropane alkaloid drug with muscarinic antagonist effects. It is obtained from plants of the family Solanaceae (nightshades), such as henbane or jimson weed (Datura species). It is among the secondary metabolites of these plants. The drug can be highly toxic due its powerful anticholinergic properties and has legitimate medical applications in very minute doses. As an example, in the treatment of motion sickness, the dose, gradually released from a transdermal patch, is only 330 micrograms (?g) per day.

 

Traces of scopolamine were found in the body found in the cellar of Hawley Harvey Crippen, executed for the murder of his wife. It is unclear whether this caused death, and there is said to be some doubt that the body found was that of his wife.

 

Scopolamine has been used under the name burundanga in Venezuelan and Thailand resorts in order to drug and then rob tourists. While there are unfounded rumours that delivery mechanisms include using pamphlets and flyers laced with the drug, not enough is readily absorbed through the skin to have an effect. However, spiked alcoholic drinks are occasionally used.

 

In recent years the criminal use of scopolamine has become an epidemic. Approximately fifty percent of emergency room admissions for poisoning in Bogot? have been attributed to scopolamine.

 

Victims of this crime are often admitted to a hospital in police custody, under the assumption that the patient is experiencing a psychotic episode. A telltale sign is a fever accompanied by a lack of sweat.

 

Scopolamine is used criminally as a date rape drug and as an aid to robbery, the most common act being the clandestine drugging of a victim's drink. It is preferred because it induces anterograde amnesia, or an inability to recall events a certain amount of time after its administration or during the time of intoxication.

 

In June 2008, more than 20 people were hospitalized with psychosis in Norway after ingesting counterfeit Rohypnol tablets containing Scopolamine.

 

Popular culture

(1940) In one of crime fiction's all-time classic novels, Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, Marlowe gets shot full of Scopolamine in a private sanitarium in order to both shut him up, and to pump him for knowledge, when he gets too close to the truth on a case, or rather several cases entangled into one another, that he is working on (the idenity of Velma and the whereabouts of Moose Malloy).

"I had been shot full of dope to keep me quiet. Perhaps scopolamine too, to make me talk."

 

(1957) In popular culture, scopolamine has achieved a moderate level of notoriety via its mention in the film I Was a Teenage Werewolf, where Dr. Alfred Brandon uses it as part of his endeavor to regress the titular character to his "primitive roots."

 

(1961) Scopolamine is featured in the World War II action classic The Guns of Navarone as a Schutzstaffel truth serum.

 

(1968) Scopolamine is featured in the World War II action classic Where Eagles Dare as a Schutzstaffel truth serum.

 

(1968) In Carlos Castaneda's series of books The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, the Datura plant is the favored shamanic, revelatory drug of the titular character. The book explores, in depth, Castaneda's experiences under the influence of the drug, as well as the rites surrounding its use and preparation.

 

(1974) In episode 1 "That'll Be The Day", of the fourth series of the TV Series Callan, Callan is interrogated by the KGB using the drug Scopolamine as a truth serum.

 

(1979) Scopolamine is also mentioned several times in Robert Ludlum's Matarese Dynasty, a fictional spy novel in which the drug is known for its uses as a truth serum.

 

(1990s) The X-Files Red Museum shows Scopolamine as a suspect agent in usage for kidnappings.

 

(1990) Scopolamine is mentioned by the villain Cain as one of the cutting agents of the drug Nuke in Robocop 2

 

(1994) In the book Blood Hunt by Ian Rankin (written under the pseudonym Jack Harvey) scopolamine, under the name Burundanga is used by the main Character, Gordon Reeve, to gain information and access to facilities in order to find his brother's killer.

 

(2000) In the pilot episode for Season 1 of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a female thief seduces a man to sleep with her. She applies scopolamine to her nipples, which knocks the man out when he ingests it orally. After she robs him and makes her escape, the scopolamine which she absorbed into her skin causes her to pass out as well.

 

(2000) Scopolamine was the drug Michael claimed he was injected with either by the military and/or the aliens in "The Mars Records". It might be worth noting in this context that scopolamine can cause confabulation (the mixing of memory and facts).

 

(2007) In the episode "Airborne", one character in the TV show House, M.D. is shown wearing a scopolamine patch.