Scopolamine: Vice TV Seeks Out the Devil's Breath

[Judi Lynn]

Scopolamine: Vice TV Seeks Out the Devil's Breath
by Jordan Yerman | April 7, 2010 at 09:38 am

Scopolamine, or Burundanga: The Devil's Breath

VBS.TV has a special feature on scopolamine, a Colombian drug purported to strip the user of his or her free will. Scopolamine (or burundanga, "the devil's breath") apparently leaves the victim fully conscious and functional, but also totally open to suggestion.

Scopolamine is used not only as a date-rape drug, but also as an aid for robbers. Prostitutes will slip it to unsuspecting customers, and burglars will use it to help homeowners empty their own homes of valuables.

Vice staffers went to Bogota to investigate Scopolamine, but the tone of their journey changed from "let's try the new exotic drug" to "this is really terrifying" as they interview victims of the drug and criminals who have used it to commit crimes.
Says one prostitute who admits to using the drug to rob johns, "Just as we use the drug to rob men, men use it to rape us. Everything about scopolamine has to do with hurting people."

Scopolamine is made from the fruit of the Borrachero tree, whose flowers are narcotic. Locals use the tree's flowers in tea as a hallucinogen, but the fruit must be chemically processed to create scopolamine.

More:
http://www.nowpublic.com/style/scopolamine-vice-tv-seeks-out-devils-breath-2602213.html

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Drug Turns Crime Victims Into Zombies
By Phil Stewart

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - 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.

"When I woke up in the hospital, I asked for my baby and nobody said anything. They just looked at me," Fernandez said, weeping. Police believe her son Diego was taken by a gang which traffics in infants.

Colorless, odorless and tasteless, scopolamine is slipped into drinks and sprinkled onto food. Victims become so docile that they have been known to help thieves rob their homes and empty their bank accounts. Women have been drugged repeatedly over days and gang-raped or rented out as prostitutes.

In the case of Fernandez, the mother of three was rendered submissive enough to surrender her youngest child.

Most troubling for police is the way the drug acts on the brain. Since scopolamine completely blocks the formation of memories, unlike most date-rape drugs used in the United States and elsewhere, it is usually impossible for victims to ever identify their aggressors.

"When a patient (of U.S. date-rape drugs) is under hypnosis, he or she usually recalls what happened. But with scopolamine, this isn't possible because the memory was never recorded," said Dr. Camilo Uribe, the world's leading expert on the drug.

Scopolamine has a long, dark history in Colombia dating back to before the Spanish conquest.

Legend has it that Colombian Indian tribes used the drug to bury alive the wives and slaves of fallen chiefs, so that they would quietly accompany their masters into the afterworld.

Nazi "angel of death" Joseph Mengele experimented on scopolamine as an interrogation drug. And scopolamine's sedative and amnesia-producing qualities were used by mothers in the early 20th century to help them through childbirth.

More:
http://www.biopsychiatry.com/scopolamine/borrachero.html

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Wikipedia: Scopolamine

Scopolamine, also known as levo-duboisine, and hyoscine, is a tropane alkaloid drug with muscarinic antagonist effects. It is obtained from plants of the family Solanaceae (nightshades), such as henbane, jimson weed and Angel's Trumpets (Datura resp. Brugmansia spec.), and corkwood (Duboisia species <2>). It is among the secondary metabolites of these plants. Therefore, scopolamine is one of three main active components of belladonna and stramonium tinctures and powders used medicinally along with atropine and hyoscyamine. Scopolamine was isolated from plant sources by scientists in 1881 in Germany and description of its structure and activity followed shortly thereafter.

Scopolamine has 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 microgrammes (µg) per day. In rare cases, unusual reactions to ordinary doses of scopolamine have occurred including confusion, agitation, rambling speech, hallucinations, paranoid behaviors, and delusions.

Etymology
Scopolamine is named after the plant genus Scopolia. The name "hyoscine" is from the scientific name for henbane, Hyoscyamus niger.

Physiology
Scopolamine acts as a competitive antagonist at muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, specifically M1 receptors; it is thus classified as an anticholinergic, anti-muscarinic drug. (See the article on the parasympathetic nervous system for details of this physiology.)

Medical use
In medicine, scopolamine has these uses:

Primary:

• Treatment of nausea and motion sickness
  
• Treatment of intestinal cramping
  
• For ophthalmic purposes.
  
• As a general depressant and adjunct to narcotic painkillers

Less often:

• As a preanesthetic agent
  
• As a drying agent for sinuses, lungs, and related areas.
  
• To reduce motility and secretions in the GI tract—most frequently in tinctures or other belladonna or stramonium preparations, often used in conjunction with other drugs as in Donnagel original forumulation, Donnagel-PG (with paregoric), Donnabarb/Barbadonna/Donnatal (with phenobarbital), and a number of others
  
• Uncommonly, for some forms of Parkinsonism.
  
• As an adjunct to opioid analgesia, such as the product Twilight Sleep which contained morphine and scopolamine, some of the original formulations of Percodan and some European brands of methadone injection.
  
• As an occasional sedative, and was available in some over-the-counter-products in the United States for this purpose until November 1990.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopolamine

[naaman fletcher]

1. Good post.

Scary. If true you can expect it to makes its way here shortly. However, drug scare stories are usually just scare stories. Let's hope that's the case here.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Apparently it's been used here since the 1960's, according to a couple of DU members

who been given the drug in a hospital setting during childbirth.

Same artical also posted in LBN, ended up in General Discussion:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8106060

Have never heard of this drug in my life, would never have guessed it been used here.