Scopolamine: Drug turns victims into fools

Shenzhen Daily ^ | June 19, 2003

[Is2C]

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, 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 after world.

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.

Finding the drug in Colombia these days is not hard.

The tree which naturally produces scopolamine grows wild around the capital and is so famous in the countryside that mothers warn their children not to fall asleep below its yellow and white flowers. The tree is popularly known as the “borrachero,” or “get-you-drunk,” and the pollen alone is said to conjure up strange dreams.

“We probably should put some sort of fence up,” jokes biologist Gustavo Morales at Bogota’s botanical gardens, eyeing children playing with borrachero seeds everywhere.

“If you ate a few of those, it would kill you.”

Although scopolamine can be easily extracted from the seeds, experienced criminals hardly ever bother with them, police say.

Pure, cheap scopolamine is brought across the border from neighboring Ecuador, where the borrachero tree is harvested for medicinal purposes, Uribe said. The alkaloid is used legally in medicines across the world to treat everything from motion sickness to the tremors of Parkinson’s disease.

The use of scopolamine by criminals appears to be confined to Colombia, at least for now

The U.S. Embassy in Bogota takes scopolamine very seriously and offers staff tips on how avoid being drugged. One piece of advice may seem obvious: Don’t let your drinks out of your sight when at a Bogota bar or nightclub.

(SD-Agencies)

More info:

Scopolamine: The Newest Drug Scare

"Reuters reports that in Colombia, criminals are using the drug scopolamine to turn crime victims into zombies. Curious that the article doesn't mention that scopolomine has been used by governments against suspected criminals for ages--as a truth serum."

Date Rape Drugs

What it is, what it does, how to be aware, what to do if you suspect its use

Rohynpol: Profile of the Date Rape Drug

"...imagine, if you can, a woman you care about caught in this frightening scenario: she's at a party or on a date, she sips her drink, and that's the last thing she remembers. She wakes up sometime later, dazed, powerless and in the hands of a rapist. She has become another victim of a potent drug slipped into her drink called Rohypnol. This is a story you'll want to share with your daughter, your girlfriend, even your wife because women of all ages are being victimized by these little pills known on the street as "roofies"....Roofies have the power to turn a woman into the perfect prey."

" The comment of a rape victim, whose drink had been surruptisiously laced with Rohypnol and who was interviewed by Tom Jerriel in the 20/20 presentation described above, are noteworthy in this regard: "As soon as I took the drink- I'd say within three minutes- I didn't remember anything that happened, until I woke up during the rape." She added that she tried to stop the rapist but passed out, and her recollection of the details of the assault was vague. The mother of another rape victim interviewed by Jerriel also cited the impact of the drug on a victim's memory as one of the insidious effects of a Rohypnol assault: "There's a perfect crime waiting to happen here: no fingerprints, no witnesses, no memory, no nothing.""

[Is2C]

Thought this was scary enough to make others aware of it.

[buffyt]

I have a gorgeous blonde brilliant 20 year old daughter who is a college student at a large university. She knows about date rape drug and she avoids bars anyway. Her parties tend to be at her house with good friends. But I still worry. She is my sunshine, my joy in life!

[buffyt]

I clicked on your link
Scopolamine: The Newest Drug Scare
and read that article and then clicked on the link at the bottom of the page and read about the movie that was made about this drug, Bill Pullman starred. SCARY STUFF!!!!