I did what one would do...
You take all the stuff back
for taxonomic identification.
You look in the literature
to see if there's any reports
and what it might have.
It was a mix of a plethora of ingredients.
Everything from, you know,
snakes and dried toads
and various plants
and then these curious fish.
While Alex arranges a meeting
with a new Bocor,
I decide to see if I can find
the ingredients Davis described
on my own.
You know, I identified the plants
and the amphibians
and I finally went around
to the fish guys.
I found this ichthyologist
sort of literally with his head
sort of inside this big jaw
of some massive fish he was
counting the teeth of or something.
And he literally reached up
and pulled from his shelf
between these dusty volumes
of the Journal of Ichthyology
a copy of Ian Fleming's
James Bond book From Russia, With Love.
One of those early books
in the James Bond, you know, saga
007 gets kicked in the shin
and he dies.
And then he turns back alive
in the next book.
That's how the guy in the lab
introduced me to the fact that
I had really landed on something.
The pufferfish is a marvel
of evolution and biomechanics.
Its internal organs contain
one of the most potent neurotoxins
ever discovered.
It is the TTX in the pufferfish
which induces the total body
flaccid paralysis,
almost indistinguishable from death.
The simple identification of the fish
suddenly took the whole Nzambi
investigation from the realm of
the fantasmagoric into the realm of
the conceivable.
The fish that were
used in the poisons
had a very interesting molecule
in their viscera,
in their liver,
in their ovaries,
and on the surface of the skin.
And this was a neurotoxin called
tetrodotoxin which
is a complex molecule.
It's about 160,000 times
more potent than
cocaine as an anesthetic.
It's about 1,000 times
more toxic than potassium cyanide.
A lethal dose of the pure molecule
would balance on the head of a pin.
But more interesting
than its sheer toxicity
was a way that it killed.
And we knew the poison
could do just what was necessary.
It mechanically blocks
sodium channels in the nerves
which brought on
peripheral paralysis,
dramatically low metabolic rates
and yet consciousness was retained
until the moment of death.
Sylvaire! Sylvaire!
I see it over here!
Okay, I see it
There!
Wow, we got it.
And it's all puffed up.
Oh, my God.
The fish is shot with a speargun
and pulled out of the water.
The entry wound is close to the brain,
with an exit wound in the stomach.
-Is it dead? -No, not yet.
Oh, wow, look it's puffing up.
Much to my astonishment
when it's pulled out of the water
it begins to inflate itself
despite the two gaping holes
in its body.
How is this possible?
I tentatively identified the fish
as diodon hystrix
a species so poisonous
that people have been hospitalized
for merely touching the spines.
The fish that I found in Haiti
being used in these preparations
were members of a pantropical
order of fish called
the Tetraodontiformes
which also include the famous
fugu fish of Japan,
the culinary delicacy.
For centuries,
certainly for generations,
specially trained chefs
have been preparing
these toxic fish.
They carefully eliminate
the toxin so that the person can
enjoy the nontoxic fillets
of the fish.
The real role of the
fugu chef is not to
eliminate the toxin altogether
but to reduce it
to the extent that the
connoisseur still enjoys the
effects of the mild intoxication
which include waves of euphoria,
tingling sensations.
One of the few substances
that walks a fine line between
food and drug.
It sounds like there's sort of like
a biphasic thing where it's like
it starts out with the TTX poisoning
and then after then they're given
scopolamine or atropine.
So we've talked for example
about the tetrodotoxin
but then what's fascinating
is that by all accounts
as Nzambi comes back around
he is fed the paste of
"concombre zombi,"
the zombie's cucumber.
Now, this is based on datura
and it includes, of course,
these tropane alkaloids
scopolamine and atropine
I am taking you to a place where we can find the concombre zombie.
Davis hypothesized that the
chemicals in the zombie cucumber
were used to keep the zombie in
a state of submissive confusion.
There's one right there.
But I'm not so sure
this is datura stramonium.
In fact, it looks strikingly similar
to morinda citrifolia or "noni",
a non-psychoactive fruit
which can be bought
in health food stores across America
Oh, it has to be older?
This would be the perfect drug
to kind of socialize the
individual into a new state of,
kind of,
psychosis if you will.
These are powerfully active drugs
they bring on a state of
induced psychotic delirium,
visions of hellfire, a burning thirst,
a sensation of flight
these are the drugs of choice
of every black magician sorcerer
throughout the world.
And they create a kind of a
psychic dislocation that
is described invariably by anyone
who takes the drug as being
incredibly terrifying.
After the preparation,
which consists of a despining
and crude hepatectomy,
the remaining organ meat is scrambled,
salted, and served on a silver dish.
There was this enormous literature on
just what these fish could do to you.
It turns out, by folk custom
in Japan if you succumb to fugu fish,
you're laid on the ground for
several days to make sure
you're really dead.
And there are case, after case, after
case in the literature and in the
newspapers of Japan of people
nailed into their coffins by mistake.
On this dish is a species of puffer
which is known to be poisonous
in October, a season where the fish
is known to contain deadly quantities
of TTX.
Yet nobody around me seems
concerned in the slightest.
The meat is chewy
and I'm delighted to say tastes
almost indistinguishable from chicken.
At the time, no one really understood
the biogenesis of the toxin
within the fish.
There was a tremendous amount of
variability, and we knew that
fifty percent of the time, these fish
were not toxic at all.
But what was fascinating is that
this meant that at least fifty percent
of the time these toxins would be
ineffective pharmacologically.
So what's going on here?
Well, that really turned out to be
the key to the puzzle.
Every drug in a sense, particularly
hallucinogenic drugs,
you know they have
absolutely neutral potential for
good or evil. An ambivalent potential.
And everything depends on the
cultural matrix in which the
drug is used.
CONTINUED IN PART 5