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[INTRO PLAYING]
RYAN DUFFY: Welcome to Bogota, Colombia.
We're here chasing after the most dangerous drug in the
world, burundanga.
Burundanga is the source of scopolamine, which is
basically like the worst roofie you can ever imagine
times a million.
You're at the whim of suggestions like, hey, take me
to your ATM.
Hey, come with me to the hotel room--
while you're completely conscious and articulate.
Apparently there is a lot of different parts of the plant
that are a bit dangerous, possibly a bit fun, depending
on what you're into.
So we're going to be looking for the tree, talking to
people who've had experience with it, and seeing if we can
find some of the actual drug ourselves.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RYAN DUFFY: So the deal with burundanga is that it pretty
much eliminates your free will.
So you're awake and you're articulate.
And to anyone else watching you, it seems like you're
perfectly fine.
But you've completely lost control of your own actions.
So you're at the whim of suggestions.
And that's how people take advantage of you.
I've heard a bunch of different stories really
running the gamut.
Some of them sound like campfire horror stories you're
told when you're growing up.
Stuff like, waking up in a bathtub with an organ cut out
and a sign saying, you have five hours
to get to the hospital.
We've of course also heard that it's used
as a date *** drug.
We heard one particularly chilling story where a guy was
taken back to his apartment, woke up the next morning in an
empty apartment completely confused as to what happened.
Went down and said to his door man, you know, why is my
apartment empty?
What happened?
The doorman said, well, you brought it out with two of
your friends last night.
All your stuff, you loaded it into a van.
And the guy was like, why in the hell would
you let me do that?
And he was like, because you told me to.
So that's kind of the stuff we're dealing with here,
complete elimination of free will while still acting which
is pretty much the scariest *** I can imagine.
[PLAYING MUSIC]
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: Columbia's basically ***.
They had the longest running guerrilla war in
all of Latin America.
They've essentially been at civil war for 60 years.
And really if you think about it, they've never not been at
war since they gained their own independence.
Other fun facts about Colombia, definitely not from
the Board of Tourism, include the fact that one in every
three kidnappings in the world happen right here in Colombia.
And as we all know, it's the ***
capital of the universe.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: Now the borrachero tree, which by the way roughly
translates to drunken binge tree, is indigenous to the
Northern Andean region.
That includes Colombia, and Ecuador, Venezuela.
But the scopolamine is really only used by the criminal
element here in Colombia.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: So despite the insane homicide rates, the
kidnapping, the narco trafficking, the civil unrest,
and everything else going on in here in Columbia, we can't
seem to find a Colombian who's more scared of anything than
falling asleep under the borrachero tree.
[MUSIC PLAYING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: So far I'm really into Columbia.
I showed up.
Beautiful women ordered me dinner.
And it's fantastic.
And they ordered a bottle of whiskey to the table.
I might not go back.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: So it's not something that is popularly
done down here then?
RYAN DUFFY: Really?
Not at all?
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: Do you know people that have been given
burundanga?
Do you have a cousin of a friend of a cousin?
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: We're here at the Botanical Gardens on the
outskirts of Bogota.
We're going to go see if we can figure out what this plant
actually looks like.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RYAN DUFFY: Those right there are the flowers that we've
heard a lot about.
And you can kind of put those in a tea and you'll
hallucinate.
You can also take the root down there, put that in a tea.
And again, you'll hallucinate.
And then there's the cacao, which kind of looks like the
mini coconut of sorts.
That has the seeds inside.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: They actually just crack the thing right there.
And then this is where the seeds are.
I mean, that's where everything comes from, right?
SANTIAGO STELLEY: Yeah.
That's what they use to actually make the scopolamine.
RYAN DUFFY: You're in business.
The most dangerous drug in Colombia and
arguably the world.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: The coke, at the end of the day, I mean, with
its obvious pitfalls and dangers, is recreational.
SANTIAGO STELLEY: Yeah.
RYAN DUFFY: Whereas there's nothing at all recreational
about what can be made with this.
It's a distinctly criminal element.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: The irony of sorts is that it's beautiful.
It's a very nice plant.
And smells very nicely.
I'm enjoying this right now.
SANTIAGO STELLEY: Seems quite Colombian all-in-all, very
beautiful and very dangerous.
RYAN DUFFY: This is pretty much the symbol of
Columbia isn't it?
If you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd walk
right by and go, that's a pretty flower.
Maybe I'll pick it and give it to my mom.
But that would be a real bad idea.
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RYAN DUFFY: So now we're here at the National
University of Columbia.
And we're going to go talk to Dr. Miriam Gutierez who heads
up the toxicology department here and apparently is an
expert on scopolamine.
We're going to try and chat with her a bit about what
actually happens when someone's exposed to the drug.
And try and figure out what this whole zombie
thing really means.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
RYAN DUFFY: Scopolamine is by no means a modern revelation
here in Columbia.
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 ***-up
people who've been using scopolamine for their benefit.
For example, in the 1930s and '40s, Josef Mengele had the
drug imported from Columbia 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.
We're in a cab right now heading over to the southern
part of the city.
We're going to meet with officials at the Bogota City
Police Department.
What we're hoping to figure out is a little bit more about
how the burundanga gangs work.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
[MUSIC PLAYING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: So it seems like a lot of the worst scopolamine
stories that we've heard start and end at
places just like this.
And the next thing we're able to get from someone is, I woke
up on a park bench day and a half later, without my clothes
on, without any money, whatever it is.
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.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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RYAN DUFFY: So, so far we've heard a lot of stories about
burundanga.
But we'd like to get a little bit closer.
So we've asked some of our Colombian friends to put us in
touch with someone who has an experience with burundanga.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
RYAN DUFFY: No idea.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
RYAN DUFFY: Oh, my God.
That better be the scariest drug I ever see in person.
RYAN DUFFY: Don't let go of that *** thing.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SANTIAGO STELLEY: Are we done with it?
RYAN DUFFY: I'm *** over it, dude.
After all this--
SANTIAGO STELLEY: Into the sewers?
RYAN DUFFY: Anywhere but here.
Not bummed to see it go, I'll tell you that much.
Like when I first got here I was super interested in it.
And it was like this novelty thing.
I've heard enough stories, man, that I'm just not
*** into that.
It's not funny at all.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Make sure you throw away those gloves before
you put them around anywhere.