[THEME MUSIC]
WADE DAVIS: I did what one would do, is you take all this
stuff back for taxonomic identification.
You look in the literature to see if there's any reports on
what it might have.
It was a mix, a plethora of ingredients--
everything from snakes, dried toads, and various plants, and
then these curious fish.
HAMILTON MORRIS: While Alex arranges a meeting with a new
bokor, I decide to see if I can find the ingredients Davis
described on my own.
WADE DAVIS: I identified the plants and the amphibians.
And I finally went around to the fish guys.
And I found this ichthyologist, 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 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.
HAMILTON MORRIS: 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.
WADE DAVIS: The simple identification of the fish
suddenly took the whole zombie investigation from the realm
of the phantasmagoric 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 the sheer toxicity was the way
that it killed.
And we knew the poison could do just what was necessary.
It mechanically blocks cilium channels in the nerves, which
brought on peripheral paralysis, dramatically low
metabolic rates, and yet consciousness was retained
until the moment of death.
-[SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: He got it.
It's all puffed up.
Oh my god.
The fish is shot with a spear gun and
pulled out of the water.
The entry wound is close to the brain, with an exit wound
in the stomach.
-[SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: Oh, wow.
Look, he'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.
WADE DAVIS: The fish that I found in Haiti being used in
these preparations were members of a pantropical order
of fish called the Tetraodonitiformes, which also
include the famous fugu fish of Japan,
the culinary delicacy.
For centuries, or 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 a mild
intoxication, which include waves of
euphoria, tingling sensation.
It's one of the few substances that walks a fine line between
food and drug.
HAMILTON MORRIS: It sounds like there's a biphasic thing,
where it starts out with the TTX poisoning.
And then after, then they're given scopolamine or atropine.
WADE DAVIS: So we've talked, for example, about the
tetrodotoxin.
But then what's fascinating is that, by all accounts, as the
zombie comes back around, he is fed the paste of (CREOLE),
the zombie's cucumber.
Now this is based on datura, and it includes, of course,
these tropane alkaloids, scopolamine and atropine.
-[SPEAKING CREOLE]
HAMILTON MORRIS: 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 that this is Datura stramonium.
Oh, it has to be older?
-Yeah.
WADE DAVIS: This would be the perfect drug to kind of
socialize the individual into a new state 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 and
sorcerer throughout the world.
And they create kind of a psychic dislocation that is
described invariably by anyone who takes the drug as being
incredibly terrifying.
HAMILTON MORRIS: After the preparation, which consists of
a de-spining and crude hepatectomy, the remaining
organ meat it scrambled, salted, and
served on a silver dish.
WADE DAVIS: 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.
WADE DAVIS: 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 50% of the time, these fish were not
toxic at all.
But what was fascinating is that this meant that at least
50% 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, 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.