Scopolamine – The World’s Scariest Drug

Introduction

VICE travels to Bogota, Colombia to find out more about a very strange and powerful drug called Burundanga, also referred to as “The Devil’s Breath.” They speak with a few people that have firsthand experience with the drug and, according to VICE, “the story took a far darker turn” than they imagined.

Burundanga contains Scopolamine, which is found in the Datura Stramonium plant, a poisonious flowering plant also commonly known as thornapple, jimsonweed, or devil’s trumpet. This drug is essentially an extremely powerful roofie that leaves the user in a “zombie-like” state, taking away the victim’s willpower. Scopolamine is used in medicine to treat nausea and motion sickness, as well as other conditions, and was once used as a painkiller during childbirth. However, the side effects include a loss of inhibition, drowsiness and memory lapses and it can leave the victim unconscious for up to 24 hours or more.

There have been many cases of robbery and brutal sexual assaults where victims were drugged with Burundanga. In 2023, for example, the U.S. Embassy in Colombia released a statement discussing this problem, where it’s used as a date rape drug and foreigners are targeted through nightclubs, bars, or online dating applications.

See also: What VICE Didn’t Tell You About Borrachero

Quotes

“The deal with Burundanga is that it pretty much eliminates your free will. You’re awake and you’re articulate, and to anyone else watching you, it seems like you’re perfectly fine. But you’ve completely lose control of your own actions. So you’re at the whim of suggestions and that’s how people take advantage of you.”

“One gram of Scopolamine is like a gram of cocaine. It’s the same shit. It has the same density, weight and look. But with one gram you can kill up to 10 or 15 people. That’s why it’s so extremely delicate and hard to get. I can get it because I know where to get fucking anything.”

“It’s called Floripondio. It’s scientific name is Datura. From there you extract the Scopolamine. But in Colombia we also call it Borrachero or the Devil’s Plant. The powder is extracted from the “cacao savanero.” That’s the fruit. But then powder has to be treated chemically. To grind it, bleach it and make it into a pill or whatever, you need a chemical. It’s ike how you use ether to process cocaine etc. The process is completely chemical.”

“From a medical point of view, it’s the perfect substance for criminal acts because the victim won’t remember anything and, therefore, won’t report anything. Because when they try to remember who gave it to them, their memory is gone. And when they wake up and realize that they’ve been robbed, they don’t remember that they themselves collaborated. And so, that’s the property that is thought to be exploited from substances like these that have the ability to “hypnotize” the patient

“Scopolamine is by no means a modern revelation here in Colombia. The Indigenous people in this area have had a whole bunch of uses for the drug. For example, when a chieftain died, all his assorted females, wives, mistresses, what have you, they had to go as well. Now that could be a bit of a dicey process. But what better way to shore things up than to slip them some scopolamine and suggest they walk into a grave. When they did, they were buried alive.”

“In modern times, there’s a whole litany of fucked-up people who’ve been using scopolamine for their benefit. For example, in the 1930s and ’40s, Josef Mengele had the drug imported from Colombia to Germany to use in some of his interrogations. More recently, the CIA tried to use the drug in the ’60s during the Cold War as sort of a truth serum. The problem with all of this is that in addition to a whole lot of truth, there’s a good bit of hallucination involved.”

“This drug has always been kind of inextricably linked to sex in some way or another. From its earliest uses, to eliminating a lingering mistresses, to fallen chieftains, to its eventual use in easing the pain of childbirth, to the stories we’re hearing on the streets today about prostitutes giving it to unsuspecting johns, or about men turning women into prostitutes by suggesting they go and earn some cash. It always seems to come back to sex in one way or another. And it always seems to start at places like this.”