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The Serpent and the Rainbow

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Wade Davis, a Harvard ethnobotanist (someone who studies the relationship between people and plants), took a trip to Haiti in 1982 to study the pharmacology behind the zombie legends there.

He soon learned that a living person can be given a mixture of drugs that will make them seem dead at first, and then put them into a living trance where they can be easily controlled. These drugs included tetrodoxin (a poison found in pufferfish) and datura (a plant that contains toxic hallucinogens).

Davis chronicled the story of Claivius Narcisse, a Haitian man who was poisoned by his brother, turned into a zombie, and made to work as a slave at his brother’s sugar plantation, in his book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. (via amazon.com)