giddy girlie

jtotheizzoe:

From Mo Costandi, the strange pharmacology of Haitian voodoo “zombies”:

Haitian doctors, on the other hand, consider zombification to be a result of poisoning, and there are reports that sorcerers use a white powder called coupe poudre to zombify their victims. In the early 1980s, Wade Davis, an anthropologist and ethnobotanist who was then working at Harvard University, travelled to Haiti in order to determine the ingredients of the coupe poudre. He interviewed a number of sorcerers and collected 8 samples of the zombie powder from 4 different regions of the country.

… Davis hypothesized that the main ingredient of the coupe poudre was tetrodotoxin, ingestion of which usually causes death by paralysis. In sub-lethal doses, however, it causes a significant reduction in heart rate and metabolic activity, and puts one into a state in which they are completely paralysed but fully conscious.

… The sorcerer then administers another cocktail of drugs that leaves the victim in a permanent state of delirium and disorientation.