Zombie Drug: It's Gonna Get You

Is there really a "zombie drug"?

If there isn't, how can it be a "problem"?



In case you were wondering what CNN Headline News does to fill the time it didn't use to report on the John Edwards Love Child Scandal or ask questions about the Larry Sinclair-Barack Obama sex and drug allegations, we may the answer.

They spent 7 minutes a year ago on this "scary" documentary about scopolamine--a common ingredient in motion sickness medications.
In medicine scopolamine has 3 primary uses: treatment of nausea and motion sickness, treatment of intestinal cramping, and for ophthalmic purposes. Use as a general depressant and adjunct to narcotic painkillers is also common. The drug is less commonly used as a preanesthetic agent and uncommonly for some forms of Parkinsonism. Scopolamine is also used as an adjunct to narcotic 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 well as use of tablets or patches to combat nausea as well as enhance the pain-killing ability of various opioids. Scopolamine can be used as an occasional sleep aid and was available in some over the counter products in the United States for this purpose until November 1990.

Just in case you weren't sufficiently terrified by the weenie producer and his pantie-waist "Tales from the Dark World of Scopolamine", he:

1 soundtracked a cheesy voo-doo wailing music throughout the whole interview.

2 invented scary stories, i.e., "We were afraid he would blow some of this drug in our faces and steal our car."

3 Keep talking about how frightened people are of it.

4 Kept referring to scopolamine as "The Zombie Drug".

The only trick in the "drug demonization" handbook he left out was saying that blacks liked to use it to rape white women.

Watch the CNN "Report" and then you decide for yourself



Usually, demonization of a substance is the first step in getting more money appropriated so drug warriors can combat the new "demon drug".

The whole thing started with a couple books written back 1982 by a Canadian.
Wade Davis, a Canadian ethnobotanist, presented a pharmacological case for zombies in two books, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988).

Davis traveled to Haiti in 1982 and, as a result of his investigations, claimed that a living person can be turned into a zombie by two special powders being entered into the blood stream (usually via a wound). The first, coup de poudre (French: 'powder strike'), induced a 'death-like' state because of tetrodotoxin (TTX), its key ingredient. Tetrodotoxin is the same lethal toxin found in the Japanese delicacy fugu, or pufferfish.


At near-lethal doses (LD50= 5-8µg/kg), it can leave a person in a state of near-death for several days, while the person continues to be conscious. The second powder, composed of dissociatives like datura, put the person in a zombie-like state where they seem to have no will of their own.

Davis also popularized the story of Clairvius Narcisse, who was claimed to have succumbed to this practice. There remains considerable skepticism about Davis's claims, although there is wide belief among the Haitian people of the existence of the "zombie drug". The Voodoon religion being somewhat secretive in its practices and codes, it can be very difficult for a foreign scientist to validate or invalidate such claims.


As always, we prefer to let the reader make up his own mind.

But if you ask us--and nobody did yet--we'd be quick with our decision of this "report".

Zombie drug, my ass.

by Mondoreb
image:
Source:
* Scopolamine
* Zombie

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