From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt our pal Nol is on an adventure.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control decad Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. And I was thinking a good way to open the conversation this evening. Not everybody likes to hear this, but folks, fellow conspiracy realist, if you are listening tonight, you can thank drugs. We're not saying everybody's tuning in because they're under the influence of something
at this moment. Matt, I was just I was thinking through this. At some point in every human's personal history, a drug of some sort has saved your life or the lives of your ancestors, the people who came before you know, penicillin, chemotherapy, even insulin treatments. Right in the modern day, drugs have saved countless lives, oh.
For sure, even potentially something as innocuous as aspirin, or maybe you feel as though a drug has saved your life when you've taken a pain pill because you've been in excruciating pain and couldn't mentally handle it. You felt but this magic little medicine, this drug got you through something. And one of the weird things with these drugs is that you are prescribed very specific doses of them when you've taken them, and potentially when they've saved your lives,
even something like you know, an antibiotic. But if you overtake any one of these drugs, there are potential very, very very bad effects.
Here are the facts. I don't know if it's this way in every language, but in English the word drug has a pretty rough connotation. Nowadays, we associate it with the heartbreak of abuse and addiction. And when we hear the word drug, a lot of us, I think it's fair to say, immediately think of illegal narcotics, O bioids, crack cocaine, things like that. But the real definition of a drug is much simpler, so much so that it's
kind of unhelpful. A drug is technically, quote, any chemical substance that affects the functioning of living things and organisms.
Okay, that sounds like a lot of stuff.
So yeah, at that point we have to ask ourselves, if this is true, then what is not a drug by that definition? Right?
Is right? Yeah? I mean any sugar potentially falls into that. Gosh, I guess even guess even sodium.
Yeah, I mean sodium is a chemical substance. I mean drug use is also one of the oldest of all human technologies. I remember years ago we both got super into the theory that early humans ingesting hallucinogens may have led to the creation of religion or the breaking of the bicameral mind.
Yeah, the evolution of the thought process that we associate with humans may have had something to do with weird neurological connections that were made or you know, remade or broken apart and reconnected because of psychotropic drug use.
So cool, so cool. Can't really prove it, can't prove it yet, but what a cool uber conspiracy. We know we can prove that well. Before the invention of the written word, humans around the world knew some substances had beneficial effects and some harmful effects, which leads us to the question people still ask today, what then, is the
difference between a good drug and a bad one. It's a confusing question you pointed out earlier, so astuteley man, that these even the most innocuous substances can be dangerous or deadly and high enough doses or depending upon how they interact with other substances, which is why you get weird warnings about when you should or should not consume things like grapefruits.
The thing my parents are dealing with right now. Really, yeah, grapefruits, man, Who would.
Have thought it's the least favorite fruit for me?
Oh, I can understand why. I think there are specific species of the grapefruit that are pretty wonderful, or you know, versions of the grapefruit that are a little sweeter, less obnoxious to the old taste buds.
Yeah, I'll come clean with you the reason, and lest I seem to cast on an all grapefruit enthusiasts, do as you will. The reason for me is probably due to a situation where I was stuck out in this camping compound for several weeks and we were slowly running out of food and beverages, and the last thing left that was not water was grapefruit juice that had clearly gone bad in my opinion, and it was my first
time drinking grapefruit juice absolutely ruined it for me. I thought, this is what this thing is supposed to taste like, And.
Now I mean, it tastes like that, bro, that's what it tastes like.
That's what it tastes like. Oh boy, I was.
In a situation where my grandparents would set of my grandparents would constantly cut open a grapefruit and then each of them have a half in a bowl in the morning. Yeah, it wasn't the fun kind of grapefruit. It was just a grapefruit in dang, it's just.
Oh it wasn't one of the red ones or the Yeah, the bruby ones. Pretty good, that's it. Yeah. Well, this idea, right, as complicated as we can already tell it is it arrives because drugs, again, like any other technology, they have the same pitfalls. Right. A fire can burn a house as easily as it can warm a house. But in this case, with drugs, the house is you folks.
Yeah. Yeah, it's very, very, very true. And I think maybe this specific point is let's say, a learning, a lesson that was learned by military's governments, people who want to be in control. Also learned by hunters early, early, early on, that you can use a substance that might be good for you in certain respects, or at certain times or in certain dosages, but it can also be deadly to an enemy or some thing you're trying to eventually eat.
And the weirdest part is all across human civilization. In most cases we still don't know which use. Humans figure it out first. They say, oh, this poison is actually a medicine, or oh, whoops, this medicine can be also be a poison.
I want to, I want to, I want to believe. Let's say that it was medicinal first, like right, some kind of herbs that were discovered to or just through testing and experimentation and word of mouth. Try this specific herb concoction and it will actually help your stomach if it's hurting really badly. But if you take too much of it and apply it to an arrowhead, you're going to make whatever you know deer or you know bison that you're hunting, it will go down way faster.
And you'll add importantly, you'll still be able to eat it, so it will be contaminated, right, which you can't say
for all all substances. I also, I'm with you, Ben, I kind of like to think there is some relationship between the belief and sympathetic magic there because someone, perhaps someone got sick or they got cut by something and substance entered their bloodstream, and someone said let's go back to the you know, the scene of the crime or the accident, and said, well, let's try a different version of the thing that cut you, you know, because you're
going to die anyway. There's a lot of trial and error, is what we're saying. And there's still a lot of errors today. Recently, a collaboration that you and I did with the folks over at Lava for Good, a panel about the war on drugs in the US and abroad, which is now up for a Webby. Everybody please go vote. It'll be the first time we've gotten a Webby for something we were on air for. Is that correct?
Maybe? Well, I don't know. Thirteen Days of Halloween I believe won a Webby, oh, which means and I think it was one of the season. It was definitely a season that you wrote on. It was definitely a season that I executive produced on. So no, we had well, but I was not.
On Mike wells to Mike either well semi congratulations to both of us, and also with you to check out do check out thirteen Days as a cantel.
Matt and I really really love the work that goes into that and it makes our day whatever people get to experience it for the first time. But with the social effects of drug use, right, I love that you laid out any kind of controlling, authoritative structure has struggled with this. Religions, governments, you name it, your favorite cult leader, they have these policies around drug use, meaning there are
social effects. So if you live in the US, whether or not you indulge in cannabis, you know, millions of people get locked away for non violent drug crimes. It ruins their lives, It sets them on a cycle of recidivism that gets increasingly difficult to escape and increasingly expensive
to survive within. And then you know that's still better, sadly than places in the Middle East and Southeast Asia in particular, where a comparatively minor amount of certain narcotics can lead to a death sentence and your home government cannot save you. Hear us, well, Americans, your home government cannot save you. If a country has a death penalty for drug possession.
And you get caught with it, Yeah.
Don't do it. If you feel like you have to have your drugs. In that case, stay home, go somewhere else.
Also, don't carry around large sums of cash with you, especially if you're going to an airport, especially when in Atlanta.
Yes, oh nice, Yeah, shout out to Clayton English and Eric Andre. Check out that panel, folks. There's also just a side note here. There's also something a lot of people don't understand. If a foreign government that has really draconian drug policies wants to get you for possession, they can drug test you, and having a substance in your hair, or your bloodstream or your body will for them count as possession.
Oh yeah, if it is in you, I suppose you do possess it. Yeah, I don't know.
It depends on really, it depends on what they want to do with you.
Well, it's more like it's possessing you, right, Nah.
Yeah, it depends on the substance. And this gets us to these are all true chilling conspiracies, but it leads us to another side of the story. A disturbing aspect to drugs and humans that we briefly discussed but haven't really explored fully. It's this what happens when people purposely decide to use drugs as weapons. We're going to pause for a word from our sponsors. We'll be right back.
We've returned. Here's where it gets crazy, man. Man, we were just compared notes before we went on air, Matt and I think we both yet again, we both got super into the same two big topics and they're I don't know, man, I'm bothered.
I don't think it's bothersome. I think this is exactly the kind of thing this topic needs us to discuss.
Like some specific examples of when drugs were used as weapons, right, but that are not the let's say, traditional chemical weapons we might think of, right, Like especially chemical weapons that are associated with World War One, mustard gas, some of the stuff that was developed by the Nazis, some by you know, British and American forces, but chemical weapons that were meant to be dropped often from above and meant to incompare state or kill enemy combatants down below. We're
talking more. When is a more medicinal drug that we would think about when is that used or has it been used as a weapon.
Yeah, and that's an important distinction. We know, we know chemical warfare or drugs as weapons. We do associate it with World War One these days with nerve gas and uh later with VX and stuff like that. But but again it goes back to the ancient past. In eight one eight four BCE, Hannibal's army used Belladonna to disorient enemy forces.
And I do what is Belladonna?
Belladonna is one of the Okay, so there's like a Wu Tang clan of these plants that have these drugs.
Now you're gonna say, there's a member of Wu Tang called Belladonna that I've never heard of, And I was like.
I would totally I would totally tune in it out. It's uh, it's from the night shade family. Okay, okay, and a lot of these things that we're going to explore originate from the night shade family. It's if you look at it, it's like an herb. It's a it's a bush basically, and you can find it throughout Central and South Eurasia. It gets pretty tall. It is toxic. Its other name is Deadly Nightshade, Oh, to differentiate it from the rest of the good folks at the night Shade family.
And you said, Hannibal way back then used it as not as a maybe lethal technique, dosing technique, but as a disorienting thing.
Yes, And to be clear, Hannibal would have been fine if that disorientation led to death.
Sure, sure, But in this case, it's more like make my troops advancement more effective by disabling.
Your troops, a little like a flashbank, right in some ways. And then I didn't know this, But there's this author, David A. Price, who has a book called Love and Hate and Jamestown. And in this book, which I haven't finished, in this book, he makes a pretty fascinating case. He says that Chief Palwaton had deployed a toxic hallucinogen against the Jamestown colony in sixteen eleven, which I had not heard before.
Was it bread? Was it was it that?
Er? I don't know, man, I don't know this, but this is just These are two examples from across centuries and continents. We also, I think you and I were both very taken with an article about this conundrum by a scholar named Vladimir Pitchman and his co author's name.
Yes, the co authors, Well, the co author is zd n e. K Zeni Hahn. And there's also an academic editor that worked on this paper, Mirta Milic.
And this paper is fascinating. It's called Drugs as Chemical Weapons, Past and Perspectives. You can read it in full online for free today. They make this case where they say, look, the sources of pretty much any poison that's been deployed by the big criminals or state powers, they've also always been natural agents that serve as medicines. And then he says, you know, originally the most militarily significant toxins, they were discovered as a byproduct of pharmaceutical research most for most
of history. It wasn't until pretty recently that governments started saying, let's make bad stuff on purpose.
Yeah, let's have an R and D department that specifically tries to figure out the most toxic, dangerous chemicals or just natural substances that we can then synthesize with a new thing that's exactly the same chemical combination, or we can concentrate and combine to make something that just makes you dead.
Yeah, drugs are a dual use technology now that we think about it, aren't they. And then, of course there's that lovely, lovely phase that so many governments went through several decades back, where they would find nifty unfamiliar substances and then say, hey, what does this do? Let's just you know, let's fa fo Yeah, but what it do?
Though? You know what I mean?
What shout out to mk ultra, shout out to the CIA's weird phase with LSD when they were literally just dosing the snot out of each other.
Yeah, yeah, hey, let's just we can't recommend this article enough because there was a huge list that Ben and I were discussing off air that it shows what we were talking about early on here arrowhead toxins that were also used as for medicinal purposes by indigenous groups across the world. It is really great, Like, it's really great and worth your time. We decided that we cannot pronounce effectively most of the words that I decided I decided that I can't pronounce.
We can make an attempt, but we're not going to nail a lot of these because we are not chemists.
But yes, but do look it up because it's very fascinating. It goes across I think it's every continent that it hits. Where here is a series of medicinal herbs that were also used as offensive weapons.
Yeah, and here's the good thing that people learned to do with this stuff, like treat skin problems or fungal infections, and then they found out they could also poison animals and yeah, I don't know. I mean also, you know, if you fast forward to the modern day, there's one story that we have to share that captivated both of us because we were saying, you know, to that earlier
distinction you made. We were saying, let's find a case where someone took not like a not mustard gas, not a nerve agent, but what you would consider a quote unquote regular drug, and let's see when they used it offensively on purpose in the modern day. That takes us to Russia in October of two thousand and two at the Moscow Ball Bearing Plants Palace of Culture.
It's also known as the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, and this is well, there was something that was showing that night according to the BBC. I'm just going to cite this article, Ben so people can find it if they want to. There's a BBC article from October twenty fourth, twenty twelve titled Moscow Theater siege Questions Remain Unanswered, which is written ten years after this thing we're talking about that happened in two thousand and two, and it gives
us a little bit of context. But what we need to know is that there is a show going on them, a musical going on at this huge theater in Moscow, when it is stormed by a bunch of people.
Yeah, so later results will find that nine hundred and twelve people or so we're in the audience and they're watching that musical you're describing, nord Ost and I think they're just moving. They're relatively early into the show. I think they're in the second act maybe. And these terrorists
male and female, identified members of the Chechen army. Some of them have explosives strapped to their body, and they have one demand, and it is the typical demand of Chechen separatist groups, or as Russia will call them, Chechen separatist groups. They say, Russia, withdraw all of your military forces immediately, all of your state forces, free Chechnya. And this was a common demand. This withdrawal because Russian forces had been occupying Chechnya had left, had come back, and
for fifty seven hours it was a brutal standoff. We know that two of the hostages died sometime in that fifty seven hours, but the Russian authorities were at a loss. They had the place surrounded. These terrorists were not going to make it out one way or the other.
Well, and there, let's say there were there were at least forty militant yes, or you know, people who were in there as the hostage takers who were controlling the
nine hundred and twelve people who were hostages. So if you just imagine a huge theater that number of people and then think about strategies of going in and stopping the situation, if you're going to do it by four yeah, yeah, I imagine those Russian forces strategizing and you know, a room of people trying to come up with the best way, and what do they come up with?
They came up with what you might call a very Russian solution to the problem. Right, if they attempt to breach this facility occupied by a small basically a militia, they would lose most people before before they could rescue hostages. So their solution is novel, it's innovative, it is incredibly ruthless. They pump what is first described as an unknown gas into the building, and they pump a lot of it in nearly all of the terrorists and hostages fall unconscious immediately or die.
Yeah, and well, at least according to BBC News and people reporting on it at the time, there was no warning given to anybody that this gas, this subs since whatever it was was going to be deployed, and they didn't even warn like some of the first responders that were immediately outside of the facility. So and it was leaking outside of the facility and affecting people that were nearby.
Yeah, you're just some guy at you know, the sandwich shop next door.
Well, yeah, we're a fireman or you know, just first respond exactly who's outside and there's some kind of weird smoke looking stuff coming out of like some of the ventilation or the side of the building, and it's affecting you. And how did they describe it at the time after they they because they acknowledged it like hours and hours later that they released some kind of gas.
Yeah, yeah, you're just saying how did the international news or how.
Did the expression authorities acknowledge that they even gassed people?
Oh?
Oh, do you have the quote? I think BBC as this one.
Well, according to this BBC News article by Artem Kretschetnikov, he is saying that public health services were not warned in advance that this type of I don't know measure would be used releasing a gas into this huge building. Police did not clear the nearby streets of any parked vehicles. Ambulances arrived on the scene an hour and a half after the operation began, and again this gas was still it wasn't being dispersed actively, but it was still dispersing out of the building.
Yeah. The phrase they would use is an aerosol anesthetic later when they explained this. But for a lot of the surviving hostages, we see that they originally thought there was smoke from a fire somewhere else. Yes, because it was pumped through the AC system.
And then the authorities I found it been. The authorities didn't acknowledge it until eight hours later that they even did that.
And as oh, okay, we'll see why that was sort of a dick move.
Oh, and they didn't say what gas it was, and.
They did not see what gas it was. Later, the Russian Health Minister Yuri Shivchenko would say that this gas is based on fentanyl. What this means is that the gas was later found to contain car fentinyl opioi, ten thousand times more powerful than morphine, about one hundred times more powerful than fentanyl, which is already very scary stuff. It's rippen through various parts of the world like a
natural disaster. But I guess we should also point out, now we're talking about this off air, do we still have to smack in allegedly on this one.
I guess we probably should. There have been some court cases associated with this because one hundred and thirty hostages died during this operation. One hundred and thirty. Of those nine one hundred and twelve. Many of them died at the hands of, you know, allegedly the hostage takers, at least according to the reports. But some of them died from the effects of the gas, some of them pretty soon after it was released and others days after it was released.
Oh yeah, here's a terrifying quote from an author named David Sadder in his book The Less You Know, the Better You sleep. He studies Russia extensively for the Hudson Institution.
Can we just say that quote is amazing. The less you know, the better you sleep.
Yeah. Yeah, and that's not even the full title of the book, but yeah, but we went with the bangor part. So here's the quote. Here's a quote from Sader's book and talks about how when after the breach, after the authorities deployed the gas and breached the theater, they just started dragging folks out, and they did not discriminate between the hostages and the terrorists, or excuse me, the hostage takers,
nor the living and the dead. They just piled them all up like firewood in buses and cars, and Sadder says they were bodies were piled on top of another each other outside the theater entrance, no attempt to separate the living from the dead. A well known songwriter died after spending seven hours alive in a bus packed with corpses. Godly thirteen year old girl was also crushed beneath a mass of hostages in a mini bus died on the way to the hospital.
Geez, well, let's talk about why this is so messed up, Why the tactic itself was messed up to just release gas at whatever concentration it was at into a massive area with a huge group of people, because no matter what that substance was, whether it was carfentanyl or some other fentanyl derivative or some other sleeping gas as they called it, you are dosing everybody with the same amount. Right.
And as we know, when you go to the doctor and you get prescribed a medicine of any kind, and they look at your weight, right, your height, you're sometimes your BMI, which is a flawed thing anyway, but you know your body mass.
Index, other medications you might be taking.
Yes, your age, right. The everything goes into account for how much of a certain medicine you are supposed to be getting, what dosage. In this case, they dosed everybody with the same amount with the hope of disabling like grown men with Kalishnikov's.
Right and suicide bombers.
Yes, so they're going you gotta think they're going for an od effect.
Yes, yeah, And then there is some brutal calculus that
we can unfortunately understand. Right, we don't have to agree with what they did, but we can understand where they were coming from because it was from their perspective, it was a at least in the official narrative, they were saying, Look, we can try traditional methods and lose all of them and probably quite a few of our own officers, or we can try to save some knowing that some of these hostages will die, you know, because again it's almost a thousand people.
Yeah, we're gonna save some people. That's the thought, right.
Well, if that was the thought, however, and we could even we could make an entire episode about this theater situation, because there's a lot going on under the surface. But if that was indeed their thought, then why did they refuse to reveal what they had dosed the theater with? Because in those eight hours it took them to reveal the actual ingredients of the drug they weaponized. Doctors were losing patients in the hospital because you have to know
what happened to someone to treat them. So they're scrambling, and we cannot praise these doctors highly enough. They're in a terrible situation. It's a ticking imbomb, and they're going through one antidote or treatment or cure after another. They finally scramble lot. I think it was uh NOTx alone.
Oh yeah, like the stuff that you save someone who is overdosing on an opioid.
Right, yes, yeah, that's stuff. And all of the hostage takers did die. One hundred and thirty or so of the hostages died, and most of the hostages who died was a result of the terrorism. For the hostage takers, it was a result of the gas that the Russian government deployed.
Yeah, we don't know the exact details, which is a problem. Right Again, this has gone to trial. There's been examinations of this, like what happened there with some conclusions that feel more concrete than others. But definitely the forty people. Well, and let's say thirty nine of the people that were hostage takers were killed either by being shot, after being
disabled or whatever. But there's one guy who ended up having to stand trial for this, literally one human being out of the forty Oh that's right, he made it out alive that had to stand trial. But then the you know, the rest of the families of the other people, specifically the one hundred and thirty that died, were left with so many questions trying to figure out what the heck happened, and what do you do now? Like, what do we do now? Yeah?
What about when leven Letvigneko said later that some of these hostage takers or Chechen militants were working for the FSB, you know.
See, Yeah, well, we don't want to focus too much on this, but how did the Chechen rebels get into Moscow? One hundred kilograms of explosives, one hundred hand grenades, three what they call heavy bombs, and eighteen ak assault rifles and twenty pistols by the way, but how did they get into the country and threw all the checkpoints and into the heart of Moscow to take like to make this attack happen?
And how okay? And also what about the signals that the Chechens were sending out pretty blatantly in the month's leading Okay, you're right, you're right. We'll have to do an episode because otherwise we're just okay, all right, maybe Matt, what about this? Should we take an ad break and get to another drug as a weapon? Uh?
Yeah, please?
And we have returned. I believe this is what originally inspired this episode. This evening, Matt, on a previous strange news you had shared an intensely disturbing story of criminals operating in the Atlanta area and drugging partygoers with something.
Yeah, gosh it, it's unknown right now what drug was used in these specific attacks. There were also attacks in New York City that were very, very similar with substances. Whatever the substance is, it was, it was used to make someone seem extremely intoxicated and lose consciousness at some point or to some extent, and also become extremely what word would you.
Use, suggestible, compliant.
That's it. That's what it is, Just going along with things like everything's okay, but not having all of your faculties anymore.
Yeah. Yeah, And this prompted a conversation that we've had with many of our fellow conspiracy realists via email via the various waging contact us like our call in line, and a lot of us were bringing up a substance made from the Torah seeds are also derived from the nightshade family, called scopolamine s C O P O L A M I N E. It is way more fun to sound out that word than it is to take that substance.
Yeah, it's called the most dangerous drug in the world, and it's also used it's called in other place in the Zombie Drug and Devil's Breath. Yeah, it's got all kinds of words, specifically because of the way it was deployed. Gosh, where was that ben We heard about it being deployed in several countries where it was made into a powder that was then blown into somebody's face.
Yeah, Columbia was big for that, parts of other parts of the region, like Ecuador. Yeah, but the substances like this can be derived from a lot of different forms of the night shade family, and you can find scopolamine in things like man drake, angels, trumpet, h main plants to be honest, that I would not be able to readily identify in the wild.
Yeah, but this specific plant is detura, right, That's the one. We had people writing to us after we had that discussion on Strange News talking about Detura and the seeds from that plant.
Old Jimson Weed. He's another name for it, which is way more innocuous, Jimson weed. Jimson Weed sounds like a character in a Wild West story that we would make up, you know.
Yeah, I like him. If he's a little bit older. He's been around for a long time. Old Jimson Weed. He's seen it all, you know.
Okay, we needed that levity, but yeah, maybe we should write that, maybe we should use the character Jimson Weed into it. He always he's always vaguely surprised.
He's got a dog.
So all right, Each of these plants, as Jimson can assure you, will have a long history in the spiritual practices of indigenous cultures around the world. Like they're not universally considered demonic, insidious, or bad. I was surprised to learn the name Daturah comes from India because thed torah metal, a related plant, is considered to be a sacred favorite plant of the god Shiva.
Oh cool, Am I wrong? Isn't Shiva like the creator destroyer?
Yeah? No, you're right.
Okay, yeah, that's interesting. Isn't that interesting? Creator and destroyer?
Uh yeah the uh? I think Sheiva is the destroyer of trinity?
Oh okay cool?
Who yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, No, you're right, because Shiva creates the universe, but that is also the destroyer in the trimurty, the Hindu trinity.
Look, man, I'm just going off of these weird little impulses that are bouncing around my brain of things I may have read once and so I have no idea. I need to bone up on my Shiva.
Dude, we should go to We should go to BAPS.
Oh, I would love to go there. We should go do some stuff, talk to some people.
Yeah, let's actually, let's make a day of it.
Let's see it.
We are very lucky here in the fair metropolis of Atlanta to have some to have a collection of holy places, watts, temples, and monasteries even and BAPS is a Hindu temple with quite a story behind it. And lest we sound, lest we sound like we're, you know, super fancy guys or something, Matt, the reason I want to go to the temple is I want to go back to the gift shop again because they have comic books about Shiva. Oh cool, Yeah, they're really cool.
And temples too, Yeah, exactly. What's a good way for people to find if you want to look it up, just b a PS Atlanta is probably the only search terms you need to be able to find this amazing place.
Maybe BAPS Atlanta Hindu. There you go, just to be safe, but that'll lead you to BAPS. Sri swam and Ari on Mandir coumples are called mandas. It's in Lilburn, Georgia. So if you happen to have some time in Atlanta and you want to see something cool, then do check that out.
Like astounding and unexpected, like yeah, when you behold it and you're like, wait, where am I? How did this?
Why? What? They've got a great vegetarian restaurant on the ground. All they ask is that you don't bring meat or leather products into the grounds, which I think is very reasonable. But it's such a trip to find it because directly across the street there's a subway.
Well, thank goodness, there are least sandwiches.
I always remember that because pre internet days, I was attempting to find this for some unrelated research and meeting some folks, and I didn't have like GPS, So I stopped a gas station asked for directions and the guy told me, well, you know where the subway is right and told me to just drive to the subway and take a left or something. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Check out,
check this out. What you need to know from this conversation is that these drugs do, or these substances these plants do, again have a deep religious history, right, medicine for the mind, you could say, But in the modern day, you're not gonna hear a lot about that. You're gonna much more often hear about the torah and the tore seeds and scopolamine being used in crime. And that's where like, that's where they have a little paper thing and they blow the dust in your face in Columbia or also
lace it on a cigarette. Because it just takes a little bit of this stuff.
Oh that's really scary. Yeah, any well, I guess it's true for so many drugs. But any drug or substance that you can just slip into something like that or dose, you know, another thing that you're going to take in either either by inhaling or drinking that that is just super freaky because it is somewhat or mostly invisible, yeah.
Tasteless, odorless, it's and it's just a couple sniffs and then the effects are severe, virtually immediate, and to the unsuspecting bystander, the effects are invisible. Yikes, you're not you know, you're not like Hunter S. Thompson on ether in Vegas or something, waving around like a cartoon inflatable guy at a car shop car shop.
Yeah. No, you may just seem intoxicated, right, And when this drug is applied to someone who is let's say, in a bar or coming out of a bar where had just you know, been having drinks or smoking a little whatever with some friends, that it may appear completely normal and just the mild effects of what whatever other substance they were in taking.
Yeah, but the criminals will know what's going on beneath the surface, and they have deployed this drug as a weapon because it makes people so incredibly suggestible to a zombie level of compliance. They can walk around on their own power. But if you say, hey, let's go to the ATM, put your card in the ATM, or give me your card and your pin number and then withdraw as much as you can, they'll say, oh yeah, okay.
Sure, sure, let's do it. And then you found an article here from GlobalPost dot Ca. Why don't you tell us about that?
Yeah, So we go to a toxicologist, an expert on this drug in particular, who points out several things. The effect can last for more than twenty four hours, and if someone is somehow still not fully compliant, then the criminals may dose them again. And if you have a large enough dose of this drug, usually delivered in like a powder form, then you will experience respiratory failure and death.
And this guy Camilo uribe this toxicologist. He says that scapolamine blocks neurotransmitters that carry information to the brain, the part of the brain that stores short term memory. So like being blackout drunk, it doesn't record what a person has done or being really high, I guess. And that's why, you know, like you were saying, you were saying, Ben, these you know, I'm remembering these things because they're popping around and the neurons of my brain. Scapolamine stops a
lot of that. And there's a chilling quote from Camilo that we were able to confirm this expert is describing things that actually happen.
Oh yeah, he says, quote, I can give you a gun and tell you to go kill someone and you will do it. Yes, hikes. Guykes. See now that speaking of mk ult and some of these other you know, experimentations and potential like pop let's say, rumors about mentoring candidate stuff, someone who is so susceptible that they will take a gun and they will you know, when they're in that state or under the effects of a substance, they will need to want to and be totally fine
with taking a gun and shooting someone. And then when they're not on that drug, they don't even remember having those thoughts. But then drug gets introduced again, and then potentially they're a killer.
Which differentiates this from other states of suggestibility, like a trance state or hypnosis. When people are in those sorts of states, they are suggestible, but they will not ordinarily do something they would otherwise not have done, you know what I mean. If they weren't going to kill someone while they were fully conscious, they're not going to do it when they're quote unquote hypnotized. But with this drug, anything is on the table.
Yeah, this drug has actual brainwashing potential.
And you might be saying, well, does that mean Manchurian candidates are real? Not quite, because of the window of time. You know, a Manchurian candidate would need to function as a sleeper agent without their own knowledge for much longer than the effects of scopolamine can create.
Well, I see, but okay, let's just let's game it out for a second. Sure, Let's imagine that yourhn se, your hand the man who you know killed Robert Kennedy. Let's just say, while he's there at that event, he this stuff is blown into his face and he has given a gun and he is told, you need to kill Robert candidate. You have to kill Robert Kennedy.
Yeah, And because I see where you're going, because he doesn't have a memory of doing this, he comes to However, that's I would say, that's like a It's like a microwave Manchurian candidate, right, a micro Manchurian because again of that time window, right, you could in the Manchurian candidate story and the fiction, right, the idea is that you could have this effect buried for years and then trigger it.
But what you're describing now you pointed out, dude, that does sound possible, right, episode, Let's do it.
I don't know. I mean, I'm just throwing things out here, trying to make connections, but it is. It is weird thinking about that drug as the potential for that drug to be used in heinous ways by let's say, a military or an intelligence agency that wants to use it for offensive reasons.
Right, Yeah, And again, when the effect wears off, it will be as though the victim is trying to recall a fading dream. A lot of people experience that pretty commonly. Throughout the week. You will wake up with a vivid dream and you'll try to remember it, and then you know, by the time twenty or thirty minutes have passed, you only remember these little tableaus, right, bro.
I'm pro I had one last night where I woke up. I thought, I woke up in my bed, took some actions, and then something horrible happened, and then I woke up in my bed again. And I swear to you I was in my house awake for that dream part. It was just it was intense. And it's that kind of thing where I don't know. This drug specifically blurs the line between reality and, like you said, kind of a dream state so much that I feel like it's one
of the most dangerous. It is one of the most dangerous things that exists on the planet.
Yeah, because if reality is perception, it is altering your reality in a non consensual way, right, and and the it's even worse than you know, some of those dreams that we're talking about. Like Matt, it sounds like you two have experienced the thing where you have a dream where that's so vivid and disturbing that you don't want to go back to sleep for a little bit. Oh yeah, yeah, that's why I'll send it an email at three thirty in the morning sometimes because I'm like, ah, they're not
going to get me this time. Back to work.
What was that book? Again? The less you know, the better you sleep.
Unless there it is, There it is. And this is exposure to this substance is even worse because you will come to in a situation that is probably very unfamiliar to you, and if you think really hard, you might be able to retrieve from your memory banks flashes like you may you may remember emptying your bank account, or throwing a bunch of valuable things from your house into
a bag, or we even found one story. Guy wakes up but his apartment's empty, and he vaguely remembers helping move all his crap out of his apartment into a van. What vaguely?
Okay, pizza and beer will do that sometimes to you, you know, like too much cheese and carbs and alcohol. Man, I really don't remember.
That's why you always take a picture of your moving crew before you start. So there's this Vice documentary that we talked about briefly as well, from twenty twelve. It's excellent. This is the one that calls this drug the most dangerous drug in the world and in Colombia. I think it's commonly derived from the boracho tree, which is roughly translates to like, I think the drunken tree or something
like that. Yeah, and the people who are making this documentary, they're down there, they're in Colombia and they're speaking with drug dealers and also just regular Colombian civilians who all confirm this stuff makes people childlike you can guide them wherever you want. The US authorities think it also wrote about this because it was seen as a big, big problem. It's just like what happens in other countries. You're at
a bar, you're at a club, you're having fun. Maybe an unfamiliar, attractive stranger finds you very interesting, you know what I mean? Who doesn't love a little affirmation of that regard, even if you're even if you're already in a relationship. A lot of people will just say like, oh, well, thank you. I also find myself pretty interesting.
There's also this scenario where there's an attractive person like that that unbeknownst to you, is making themselves known to you without approaching you, so that you approach them, which is in the exact same scenario. Just that one is even a little more insidious because it makes you think it's your.
Idea that I would say yes, And I'm glad you point that out. But that also brings up some bigger issues because people who are doing that and sort of implanting that idea or those actions in your head, they're often professionals at guing that kind of thing.
Hey, quick plug, listen to to Die For. It's another show from Tenderfoot TV, and it is with the host Neil STRAUSSI made to Live and Die in La and it talks it. The whole thing is about this Russian, alleged Russian sexpionage agent and using these types of tactics. That's what got me get about that.
To shout out the sparrows, Yeah, the concept that black Widow did not come from thin air. Yeah, but the yeah, and look it goes back to you know, what we have described sometimes as the two ten rule. Honeypot operations are real. You don't have to be a diplomat, you know, you don't have to be a professor doing some like edgy research or a business tycoon.
You might just be hanging out at a bar in Atlanta.
Yeah you can. You can also just be You don't have to be a stranger in a strange land. This can happen in much many more places than you think. And folks, we are not saying this to disrespect anybody's self esteem or your appearance or your RIZ or whatever. You just always need to be skeptical when an attractive person approaches you in an unfamiliar place, not even attractive, not even physical terms like someone with that you want.
Yes, you, specifically you, And well, this is what I would recommend to everybody. Just make sure you have zero RIZ when you're out and about as I do, and you're good to go.
Right. One of my I don't know if I ever told you this, one of the best ways I cut off a conversation. I was. I was at a crosswalk in New York City and someone is really trying to talk to me about something. So I'm just waiting, and then eventually I turned to them, because you know, they're clearly targeting me talking to me. Turned to them and then I say, just like this, I'm sorry, I don't speak English.
Effective was it?
I think it was just surreal enough because of the the American accent. It was just surreal enough. They were like, Oh, okay, this guy is either a jerk, mental issues either way, too complicated moving on to the Yeah, nice, very nice, So tell us if that works for you. But what we're what we're seeing here is that approximately fifty thousand known incidents of drugging occurred from twenty twelve on like each year in Colombia, largely in the capital city, but Columbia.
I think it's a short shrift and a lot of this reporting because when we focus on Columbia, then we are forgetting that this substance is deployed around the world. It is a drug that has been weaponized, not just for street crime. We're gonna maybe we go through some quick historical stories, Matt. I want to get to one of my favorite ones from the eighties, but this it feels weird to call the favorite.
Oh sure, well, let's just continue with scopel being there for a second, because we do know that it has been used as an interrogation additive, a little adjunctive, what you want to call it.
Just as a truth Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yea yeah.
But you can imagine when someone is super compliant and you are not. They are not holding back on all of those control mechanisms that would prevent them from revealing secret information, right or you know, confessing to a crime and saying what they actually did. You can imagine to be very helpful. And this was something that what did you find here, Ben, who was using it?
Uh? Yeah? The check Secret Police back in the nineteen fifties. In two thousand and nine, it was proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that they used scopolamine at least thrice to get confessions, so that means they used it much more often. The only way we were able to confirm the three instances is because there's an eyewitness who is credible in court in two thousand and nine. And they weren't the first to do this. Josef Mengele, the
Nazi Angel at Death, used it in interrogations. People thought it was a truth serum because it made them more compliant, but it turns out the science was sort of trash because if people are very compliant, but they're also they've also lost the ability to differentiate fact from fiction. Then whatever their confessions are are just what you told them to say.
Oh boy, you asked them.
A question in a leading way and they were like, yeah, I guess are you Elvis Presley? Now that I think about.
It, you know what, But you know, that reminds me of our exploration on torture, and the results often that you get from torturing someone is what you want them to.
Say, exactly right. And that's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow because it leads us to an even more uncomfortable series of conspiracies. And Okay, here is again I hesitate to call it my favorite story, but this is so strange. Way back in the nineteen eighties, there is a diplomat, Colombian diplomat going to Chile. Happens all the time, right, this guy's caught smuggling cocaine into the country. Diplomat smuggling cocaine. Weird disaster from the jump.
It's not a good look. You know, you're supposed to use diplomatic pouches for non illegal things. So he was going under the jail right in many ways. But apparently authorities and doctors investigated him and determined that he was under the influence of scopolamine at the time. No way, that's the story.
An unwilling diplomatic mule.
An unwilling diplomatic drug mule, and he couldn't remember who got to him, so the charges against him were dropped. Now this is a little bit weird because also, if you don't want to get in trouble for smuggling cocaine and you're aware of this drug, then maybe you could use that as you get out of jail free card.
On yourself, like hit yourself with it. Oh the cops, I'm like, whoa would that work? Oh my god?
What that's like a nuclear level strategy.
Well yeah, but instead of a you know, false tooth that's got poison in it to take yourself out. If you're an intelligence agent, you've just got a scopel, I mean tooth, take it out, crack it, and.
This guy great, we have to hold him for another twenty four hours.
Well yeah, but they didn't see it. So now you're like somebody scopeling to me.
Can you imagine you see that in just any awkward situation, right, like your your significant other is mad at you or something. Oh, you didn't defrost the chicken. Oh, no, sorry, babe, I got again. At least I still have my kidneys.
Oh, I'm sorry. I know we're joking about this, but people have died from this stuff, people robbed and assaulted with this kidnapps, and we're so sorry. I'm sorry for joking about it, but it is like, it is.
Ridiculous whatever, it is ridiculous though it is so surreal and ridiculous. I think we do need some levity. I appreciate what you're pointing out their matt because kidnappers have made use of this drug like drugging parents and abducting their children. Sexual predators use this extensively. It's just incredibly difficult to similar to ghb or Rufi's right, it's difficult to track down a criminal when the victim may have
almost no memory of the crime. And as you listen right now, wherever you are in this wide world, these crimes are continuing, and I think we could say each of these is a conspiracy all their own. Yes, a lot of these substances again do have legit medical uses, like scopolamine can treat motion sickness, but it's usually used these days as a weapon.
Yikes. And you know what scope of me is terrifying. Uh just I love that we focused on that there are other things been in here that we haven't even gotten to yet, and I feel like that's always the case. We just need to have a twenty four hour feed where we just have a conversation and it doesn't stop and just keep talking through things.
So great for our friendship, oh yeah.
Oh yeah, well and our families and our families.
Yeah.
But these things that are often called riot control agents nowadays also known as non lethal chemical weapons. Yeah, these substances that are often found through you know what do they call it, pharmacological research or a drug research that
is not weaponized, is not meant to be weaponized. But you find out about these substances, then you imagine from a military perspective, increasing the dosage on these things and then deploying them in either as the name states, in a riot situation, right to either calm down a populace or a bunch of people that are angry, probably for good reason, or to use against an attacking military or to you know, the way a chemical agent like a nerve gas would have been used back in the day,
but in this case it would be quote non lethal. So maybe it would skirt underneath some of those chemical weapons control treaties and convention that we have so like, and there is research on that. But just to go back to that article we cited before drugs as chemical weapons passed in perspectives, Uh, this, this sentence, I think
is the most important thing for our show. Research and production on new chemical warfare agents or cwa's has virtually stopped, or it's being conducted secretly, which I think because no country is going to come out and say, ah, we are making great advances in our chemical weapons department of whatever.
And furthermore, no country is going to accept without extensive proof that other countries are somehow keeping their word right, Oh yeah, why would you?
But again and they probably aren't. It's very similar to some of the pathogen research that we've talked about since twenty nineteen extensively, where there's gain of function research happening across the world to make sure that each individual country, sometimes science at large, but mostly individual countries can defend against any possible release of a pathogen within their populace, right.
And how much defensive research can you do before you are making the offensive materials?
Yes, but in this case just with drugs, but medicines.
Right, Yeah, it's a it's a hell of a loophole because it's nigh impossible to close it right until every substance has been discovered in all of its various forms. It's just it's not going to happen. And a lot of that look, a lot of that research, of the defensive research is legitimate. We're just saying that the line between defensive and offensive is much less bright. There's there's a lot of liminal gray overlap the closer you look,
and it's it's dangerous. Basically, what we're saying is the same stuff we say every time here when we talk about these kind of grifts micro and macro level. Be careful when you're out having fun. We simply cannot assume that every single stranger we meet, or every country we encounter, is going to be acting in good faith. That was depressing.
Yeah, yeah, I think most of this is. But you know, that's just kind of it's kind of our trade. Ben that's what we do. We find Jimson Weed finds that silver lining.
Oh you boys looking for some toro.
That's the name is dog silver silver Lining.
There we go Jameson Weed and silver Lighting. That's the news show. Please tune in tell us if we should make that show. Give us some background on Jimson Wheed and silver Lining. In the meantime, perhaps even more importantly, we hope that this finds everyone safe amid grand adventure. We will be back later with a se Seer Hadden episode. We've got more on supplements coming out. We've got a lot of work to do, and we'd love for you to be part of our continuing mission. Let us know
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