DRUG TURNS CRIME VICTIMS INTO ZOMBIES

BOGOTA (Reuters) - The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being
drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus.

Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering
topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten
and her son was gone.

Fernandez is just one of hundreds of victims every month who, according to
Colombian hospitals, are temporarily turned into zombies by a home-grown
drug called scopolamine which has been embraced by thieves and rapists.

"When I woke up in the hospital, I asked for my baby and nobody said
anything. They just looked at me," Fernandez said, weeping. Police believe
her son Diego was taken by a gang that traffics in infants.

Colorless, odorless and tasteless, scopolamine is slipped into drinks and
sprinkled onto food. Victims become so docile that they have been known to
help thieves rob their homes and empty their bank accounts. Women have been
drugged repeatedly over days and gang-raped or rented out as prostitutes.

In the case of Fernandez, the mother of three was rendered submissive enough
to surrender her youngest child.

Most troubling for police is the way the drug acts on the brain. Since
scopolamine completely blocks the formation of memories, unlike most
date-rape drugs used in the United States and elsewhere, it is usually
impossible for victims to ever identify their aggressors.

"When a patient (of U.S. date-rape drugs) is under hypnosis, he or she
usually recalls what happened. But with scopolamine, this isn't possible
because the memory was never recorded," said Dr. Camilo Uribe, the world's
leading expert on the drug.

Scopolamine has a long, dark history in Colombia dating back to before the
Spanish conquest.

Legend has it that Colombian Indian tribes used the drug to bury alive the
wives and slaves of fallen chiefs, so that they would quietly accompany
their masters into the afterworld.

Nazi "angel of death" Joseph Mengele experimented on scopolamine as an
interrogation drug. And scopolamine's sedative and amnesia-producing
qualities were used by mothers in the early 20th century to help them
through childbirth.

Finding the drug in Colombia these days is not hard.

The tree which naturally produces scopolamine grows wild around the capital
and is so famous in the countryside that mothers warn their children not to
fall asleep below its yellow and white flowers. The tree is popularly known
as the "borrachero," or "get-you-drunk," and the pollen alone is said to
conjure up strange dreams.

"We probably should put some sort of fence up," jokes biologist Gustavo
Morales at Bogota's botanical gardens, eyeing children playing with
borrachero seeds everywhere.

"If you ate a few of those, it would kill you."

Although scopolamine can be easily extracted from the seeds, experienced
criminals hardly ever bother with them, police say.

Pure, cheap scopolamine is brought across the border from neighboring
Ecuador, where the borrachero tree is harvested for medical purposes, Uribe
said. The alkaloid is used legally in medicines across the world to treat
everything from motion sickness to the tremors of Parkinson's disease (news
- - web sites).

The use of scopolamine by criminals appears to be confined to Colombia, at
least for now, and it's not clear why the drug is such a rampant problem in
Colombia. Some analysts blame it on a culture of crime in the Andean nation,
home to the world's largest kidnapping and cocaine industries, not to
mention Latin America's longest-running guerrilla war.

There are so many scopolamine cases that they usually don't make the news
unless particularly bizarre. One such incident involved three young Bogota
women who preyed on men by smearing the drug on their breasts and luring
their victims to take a lick.

Losing all willpower, the men readily gave up their bank access codes.

The breast-temptress thieves then held them hostage for days while draining
their accounts.

The U.S. Embassy in Bogota takes scopolamine very seriously and offers staff
tips on how to avoid being drugged. One piece of advice may seem obvious:
Don't let your drinks out of your sight when at a Bogota bar or nightclub.

Still, at least three visiting U.S. government employees here have been
drugged and robbed over the past two years. Other American victims from time
to time appear at the embassy seeking help, still shaking off a scopolamine
hangover.

"I remember one case, an American reported being drugged," an embassy
official said. "He says to his doorman 'Why did you let them walk out with
my stuff.' The doorman says, 'Because you told me to."'