The Scariest Fucking Drug in the World

Imagine, hypothetically, that there is a drug.

This drug is is derived from a widely-available wild plant native to your region. Assume that it's colorless, odorless, tasteless, and comes in the form of a powder that can be either ingested, or inhaled. Once it's in your system, it more or less begins working immediately...so someone can blow it into your face from a few feet away, sprinkle it on your food when you aren't looking, or dump it into your drink when you get up to use the restroom.

And why would someone do this?

Well, let's pretend that whoever ingests this drug experiences a wide range of effects. But that the primary effect is that the person becomes... um... "susceptible to suggestion." And I don't just mean prurient crap like sleeping with someone their judgment would ordinarily prevent them from even looking at twice. That's bush-league bullshit any jar-headed frat boy with a fistful of roofies can pull off.

No...we'll say for the sake of argument that THIS drug is some seriously hardcore shit. So much so that, once someone is under its sway, they legitimately lose control of their own free will. They might as well be a zombie that's been placed under the total mind control of whoever is handy...including the person that slipped it to them to begin with. Under this drug's influence, we'll assume that the person affected can be talked into anything.

Yeah, anything.

F'rinstance, if you say, "Hey, let's go to the ATM," they pull out their card and lead the way. Or, if you say, "Why don't you go over there and shoot that cop in the face? Here's an untraceable gun," they shrug and comply. They'll even cheerfully agree without protest to walk in front of a bus. In short, they completely submit to your control.

As an added sinister wrinkle, let's pretend that the drugged person is completely conscious and lucid the entire time, and shows no signs of being in an altered state. In fact, aside from their ludicrously agreeable nature, their own mothers wouldn't know anything was even different about them. And, of course, for added fun, we'll also say that when these people wake up the next morning, they have absolutely zero recollection of anything they got up to the day before. That is...if they're lucky enough to wake up at all.

Man...is it ever good thing that there IS no such drug, right?

Uh, yeah...About that. Say hello to Burandanga.

So pretty, and so evil. Sort of like Angelina Jolie, but worse.

"Burandanga" is the name of the drug I just described. And despite the fact that it sounds like a cooked-up MacGuffin from a shitty horror movie, I assure you...it is very, very real.

It's derived from the seeds of the Colombian borrachero tree ("borrachero" translates roughly as "drunken stupor"). It does everything I talked about, and more. It's so horrendous that even in Colombia, a country plagued by violence, kidnappings, drug kingpins and murder, it is the most feared of them all. So much so that the locals have a specific street name for it...

They call it "Devil's Breath."

For the full story on this horrifying shit (and to see just how very much that I am not making any of this up), peep the following 2-part investigative report from VBS.tv. VBS is a super-raw, street-level guerrilla reporting network that completely dispenses with journalistic conventions, and pulls some deeply gonzo shit in pursuit of their stories. Stories like the one on this deeply frightening narcotic.

So, feel free to check it out. And while you're at it? You might wanna scratch "Bogota" off of your short list of potential summer vacation destinations.

Part 1:



Part 2: