Can you truly control someone else with scopolamine?

Posted 3 years ago in topic Healthcare

Author: The Good Doctor, former Adult General Psychiatrist
Source: Quora

Unfortunately YES. As well as the methods of picking up random tourists, there is a less well known, but more frightening methods common in barrios of Colombia, particularly used on women (even streetwise ones) travelling alone.

The abusers target an emotionally vulnerable victim, either local or in a growing number of incidents, victims from abroad. The ideal victims may have been abused already or have some sort of rift with home, so that they are reluctant to return to their home country.

They are befriended by a local member of the community, often an English speaking person from the barrios. They become trusted and familiar, even to the family of the victim.

Instead of a one off sting the control process is long term. The scopolamine (often in the form of cheap, easily available ‘burandanga’) is introduced into shared meals or drinks when out together, shifting the potential blame early on, and later mixed with other 'medicines' to present the effects as psychic experience. The victim is highly suggestible[1] in these periods and is induced to stay in the abuser’s sphere of influence and not to return home. Symptoms, such as trances, are used to create ‘revelations’ to the victim[2] - that their former friends are not friends, that their future life must be with the abuser, that their life with the abuser is incredibly happy.

Mood swings (often with substantial highs) and later panic attacks and visions (hallucinations[3]) are normalised. A typical suggestion is that they are in a deep, once in a lifetime love affair[4]. This type of suggestion[5] lasts long after the drug has worn off and is re-enforced with each new administration of the drug. It is accompanied by suggestions breaking them off from friends (particularly those who might suggest), and implanting hostile stories about former friends which the victim typically shares with others who don’t understand the drug’s effects.

Men or women can be perpetrators and the whole transformation and change in lifestyle can be very convincing to friends and relatives who do not understand the process. Over time the victims may move into a state of psychosis (such as bipolar psychotic depression)[6] and as such will be in a high state of denial supported by the abusers to aggressively cut out those who recognise problem. Ask the victim if there is a problem, even when they are not under the influence, and they will strenuously deny it.

The motive are not necessarily money although access to savings have been implicated in some cases. Often it can just be linked to lifestyle or used as a ‘love potion’ to getting someone they want, until they loose interest.

The tragedy is that the whole thing is often ignored or even supported by friends and family as it seems voluntary and under scopolamine induced suggestions. They fail to recognise that what they see is not the victims free choice but a form of damaging abuse.

The damage becomes progressively deeper and the outcomes have been ranged from serious mental breakdown through death through overdose to unexpected suicide.

They can be left with the “features of dementia, speaking alone, disconnected from reality. We call that scopolamine psychosis,” according to Antioquia University clinical toxicologist Hugo Gallego Rojas[7][8]

In the case of serious mental breakdown the victim may disappear from view unexpectedly (sometimes its as simple as taking their phone and money and shifting the victim during a breakdown to another ‘owner’). All their contacts simply lose contact with them. The abuser either disappears from view or simply claims a ‘break up’.

The effect is like a traditional Stockholm syndrome and the abuser may seem like a genuine friend or lover, in some cases even marring the person they have drugged. Ultimately they always lose interest (which may have been genuine originally) typically breaking up after they have drained the abused savings, broken down their mental health and perhaps gained residential status and citizenship by marriage..

Foot notes:

[1] The Power of Suggestion: What We Expect Influences Our Behavior, for Better or Worse
[2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1...
[3] Scopolamine and the sensory conditioning of hallucinations.
[4] The love potion | Kew
[5] Colombia: Beware the zombie drug
[6] Transdermal Scopolamine and Toxic Psychosis
[7] Medellin's scopolamine threat
[8] Esta es la ruta de la escopolamina en Medellín

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