![]() ![]() The most famous source of puffer poisoning is the Japanese fugu fish. The effects of tetrodotoxin poisoning have been well documented. The most potent ingredients are the puffer fish, which contain deadly nerve toxins known as tetrodotoxin. Although a number of lizards, tarantulas, nonvenomous snakes, and millipedes are added to the various preparations, there are five constant animal ingredients: burned and ground-up human remains, a small tree frog, a polychaete worm, a large New World toad, and one or more species of puffer fish. Cognizant of the profound medical potential of such a drug, they asked me in 1982 to investigate the composition of zombie poison in Haiti.ĭuring the course of three expeditions, the complete preparation of five poisons used to make zombies was documented at four widely separated villages in Haiti. Physicians close to the case recognized that the correct dosage of the proper drug could lower the metabolic rate of an individual to the point where he would appear to be dead. In one case it was suggested that the patient had been made a zombie by a bocor who had used a poison. Scientific interest in the zombie poison was rekindled recently by reported cases of zombies under the care of Haitian psychiatrist Lamarque Douyon. The victim can move and act but cannot formulate thought.” It is evident that it destroys that part of the brain which governs speech and willpower. ![]() The bocors know the effect of the drug and the antidote. Having visited what she believed to be a zombie in a hospital near Gonaive, in north-central Haiti, she concluded that “it is not a case of awakening the dead, but a matter of the semblance of death induced by some drug known to a few: some secret probably brought from Africa and handed down from generation to generation. Nevertheless, virtually all writers acknowledge that the majority of the Haitian population believes in the physical reality of zombies.Īs long ago as 1938, Zora Hurston, a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University, suggested that there could be a material basis for the zombie phenomenon. Most authors have rather uncritically assumed the phenomenon to be folklore. According to these accounts, zombies are the living dead: innocent victims raised from their graves in a comatose trance by malevolent voodoo priests ( bocors) and forced to toil indefinitely as slaves. ![]() The anthropological and popular literature on Haiti is replete with references to zombies. His Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest was released by Knopf in 2011. A fuller account of Davis’s search for the Haitian zombie poison was documented in The Serpent and the Rainbow, published by Simon & Schuster. Wade Davis in the November 1983 issue of the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. ![]()
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