Zombies.  Do I need a safety plan? An ethnobotanist is someone who studies properties of plants used as traditional drugs in different cultures.  It’s a cool job if you are in college and looking for a life plan. Anyway, in the 80s there was this Harvard ethnobotanist who went to Haiti to investigate cases of zombieism there.  There were these cultural anecdotes about people who everyone had watched die, but then showed up later walking around, albeit laboriously, and they all seemed to be under some kind of spell. He interviewed people who were “zombies” or people who had seen deceased loved ones walking around.  He eventually hypothesized that the toxin inside pufferfish bodies, tetrodotoxin, could be causing the symptoms of zombieism. If you ingest this toxin at an almost-lethal dose, it would paralyze you slow down your heart rate leave you in a state of near death for several days You’d be conscious throughout.  It’s like a coma, but with a much higher risk of being buried alive.  Although the scientific community later asserted that the recorded instances of “zombies” didn’t exactly match the symptoms of this pufferfish poisoning, it’s still the closest thing we have to a zombie drug today. Now, this ethnobotanist also mentioned a drug from a Caribbean toad that acts as a powerful hallucinogen, making people very suggestive and reducing the power they have over their own movements. In these zombie-creating ceremonies, the ethnobotanist suggested people were “killed” with almost-fatal doses of pufferfish poison, then when they came to they were controlled with the toad hallucinogen, just shuffling around doing whatever they were commanded to.  Most likely they were instructed to look for brains, if my pop culture knowledge serves me correctly. In most zombie movies, the bite of a zombie is enough to turn a regular guy into a slack-jawed vacant-eyed shufflin’-about zombie.  It may be that the zombie had the dual fighting power of pufferfish and toad toxins in high concentrations in their saliva.  Bottom Line?  Zombies Rule/Zombies Drool.

Zombies.  Do I need a safety plan?

An ethnobotanist is someone who studies properties of plants used as traditional drugs in different cultures.  It’s a cool job if you are in college and looking for a life plan.

Anyway, in the 80s there was this Harvard ethnobotanist who went to Haiti to investigate cases of zombieism there.  There were these cultural anecdotes about people who everyone had watched die, but then showed up later walking around, albeit laboriously, and they all seemed to be under some kind of spell.

He interviewed people who were “zombies” or people who had seen deceased loved ones walking around.  He eventually hypothesized that the toxin inside pufferfish bodies, tetrodotoxin, could be causing the symptoms of zombieism.

If you ingest this toxin at an almost-lethal dose, it would

  • paralyze you
  • slow down your heart rate
  • leave you in a state of near death for several days

You’d be conscious throughout.  It’s like a coma, but with a much higher risk of being buried alive.  Although the scientific community later asserted that the recorded instances of “zombies” didn’t exactly match the symptoms of this pufferfish poisoning, it’s still the closest thing we have to a zombie drug today. Now, this ethnobotanist also mentioned a drug from a Caribbean toad that acts as a powerful hallucinogen, making people very suggestive and reducing the power they have over their own movements. In these zombie-creating ceremonies, the ethnobotanist suggested people were “killed” with almost-fatal doses of pufferfish poison, then when they came to they were controlled with the toad hallucinogen, just shuffling around doing whatever they were commanded to.  Most likely they were instructed to look for brains, if my pop culture knowledge serves me correctly.

In most zombie movies, the bite of a zombie is enough to turn a regular guy into a slack-jawed vacant-eyed shufflin’-about zombie.  It may be that the zombie had the dual fighting power of pufferfish and toad toxins in high concentrations in their saliva. 

Bottom Line?  Zombies Rule/Zombies Drool.