Rape, robbery, memory

The patch I wore released scopolamine into my body in a very low, continuous dose.  Aside from my fuzzy memory, it was otherwise benign.  But scopolamine in higher doses is being used, now, to commit crimes--rape, kidnapping, and robbery most prominently--usually by slipping it into food or drink.  When I was in Italy this summer, an elderly man, traveling with his wife, was killed after "waking up," at a train station, finding that he and his wife had been robbed, and falling onto the train tracks into the path of an oncoming train. His wife remembered accepting a cappuccino from a stranger who had befriended them, and that's about all.  The police surmised that they had been slipped scopolamine or something like it.

The drug has also been implicated in the large number of cruise ship rapes.  Criminals like it precisely because it causes short-term memory loss:  victims can't identify them or testify against them.  Blocking memory is like wiping away fingerprints. But don't be fooled--it's not that victim has no knowledge of being victimized, it's that the victim has no idea how such a thing could have happened.  Scopolamine is also known as "Devil's Breath."  That pretty much says it all.