When we learned of Krokodil and did a post on it a few days ago, needless to say, our Orange County drug and alcohol treatment center was more than a little terrified. Well, today we learned there is a new contender in the championship fight for scariest drug in the world, and it is called Scopolamine.
Scopolamine
The scariest part of scopolamine is not in its physical effects on the body, but on the effects of the mind.
Basically, you’re cool with anything that happens and are down for whatever.
Sounds great at first—in fact, the man responsible for the most in-depth documentary done thus far on the drug first planned on obtaining it to play pranks on his friends. Yet, like most people, he did not truly appreciate the effects of the drug…
It means that you could be sent into a bank to rob it on behalf of someone else. It means you will joyfully withdraw all your money from your bank account and hand it over to someone you’d never seen before. As implausible as either of these seem, both are confirmed.
For women, imagine what someone with no regard for your well-being would do if he had absolute control over you. Again, this too has been confirmed.
Worse yet, the drug causes anterograde amnesia, preventing recent memories from forming. So not only are you taken advantage of and don’t know who did it, but you don’t even know what they did and to what extend.
Chemically, the drug blocks the receptors used in memory, preventing even the most initial stages of memory formation since it doesn’t make it to the hippocampus—a key region of the brain for memory formation.
With many date-rape drugs, the memories are there, but inaccessible unless under hypnosis or some other technique for retrieving memories. With Scopolamine, there isn’t anything to retrieve.
Although not enough research has been done to confirm it, it is believed that the passivity brought on by the drug is from its interactions with the amygdala—the key area governing our fight-or-flight response.