W hen the patient arrived, he was almost completely incoherent. The man’s assistant had found him unconscious earlier that evening and rushed him to the Clínica El Rosario hospital, where the man intermittently woke up in a delusional state — struggling to breathe, his heart pounding.
“He was not recognizing where he was,” says clinical toxicologist Juan Carlos Fernández. “It gave the impression that he was still under the effects of alcohol, that he was drunk. But the tests showed us there was no alcohol effect.”
The patient, an American professional who we’ll call Mark, would later explain how he ended up in that state to Fernández, who says he has permission to share the man’s story.
Fernández says Mark didn’t remember what happened after two much-younger women approached him late on a boozy Sunday night in December 2019. He said they met in Medellín, Colombia’s infamous Lleras Park, a tropical open-air plaza surrounded by bars where dozens of sex workers openly solicit clients. The two girls suggested they all go back to his nearby apartment, and Mark obliged. The doorman would admit he saw him entering with the pair. Two hours later, the women left. But nobody heard from Mark throughout the next morning and into the afternoon until the assistant found him and brought him to the hospital.
The doctors began to suspect he had been drugged with a substance called scopolamine, also known as Devil’s Breath.
Extracted from the seeds of the trumpet-shaped brugmansia flower — which blooms resplendent pinks, yellows, and whites across South America’s Andean regions — scopolamine is tasteless and odorless, and doses as small as 10 milligrams can induce a zombie-like state of compliance. When Mark came to, he discovered that his safe had been plundered for thousands of dollars in cash. Fernández’s theory is that Mark must have told the women the code to his safe in his pliant stupor.
A test showed no trace of scopolamine, but the drug is rapidly metabolized and is extremely difficult to identify even within a few hours after ingestion. Unlike some of the other substances used by Medellín’s burundangeras, sex workers who seduce men before drugging and robbing them, scopolamine “can lead to multiple organ failures and end in death,” Fernández says.
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Two days after Mark was admitted to the hospital, he developed aspiration pneumonia. Fernández feared he might die. By then, Fernández was sure Mark had been drugged with scopolamine — no other drugs have such grave and particular effects.
Since the pandemic, tourism has exploded in Medellín as the onetime global murder capital and home of Pablo Escobar’s billion-dollar cocaine empire became a desirable global getaway. National Geographic named Medellín “one of the most inspiring places to visit in 2026” thanks to its natural beauty and bustling nightlife. Last year, more than 1.2 million tourists visited, up from less than 1 million in 2019, and the murder rate is at historic lows. However, it is increasingly a hub for international sex tourism. Adult sex work isn’t criminalized, and is highly visible in Medellín, where many American men and other foreigners come seeking to take advantage of the low prices for sex and lax age-of-consent laws.
“Sex tourism in Medellín has increased dramatically over the past decade,” says Jessica Van Meir, a Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government studying the regulation of sex work in Latin America. “Passport-bro influencers promote Colombia” as a prime sex tourism destination, she says, stressing that it’s a small minority of the sex workers in the industry who drug and rob men.
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Most of the American men who come here in search of sex workers leave unscathed, some wake up penniless — a few don’t wake up at all. Certain men have reportedly watched CCTV footage of their stupefied selves inexplicably helping their robbers gut their apartments of possessions. The same men — the victims are invariably men — then have a rude awakening when credit card statements reveal they have been taken on a drug-induced “million-dollar ride” through the city, stopping at every ATM on the way. Others become so docile they even transfer all of their savings from bank accounts and crypto wallets to their robbers. A few have died after their dates go awry, with 40 foreigners dying under mysterious circumstances in the city in 2023 alone.
Medellín is a “very happy, very open sort of place,” but that often lures foreigners into a false sense of security, says Alan Gongora, an American lawyer in Colombia whose firm has represented a number of victims of druggings, which are often perpetrated with drugs other than scopolamine. “This thing is very real,” he says. “It happens on a pretty regular basis.”
Now officials are scrambling to contain waves of druggings, robbings, and unexplained deaths involving foreign visitors. Police have launched targeted operations against criminal gangs of burundangeras, while increasingly barring entry to tourists they suspect are coming to the city primarily for sex tourism. Yet despite the crackdown, the attacks continue — and few outsiders understand how they actually happen.
Colombian police along with members of the city hall of enforce security at the Lleras Park. Camilo Moreno/Long Visual Press/Universal Images Group/Getty Images SCOPOLAMINE ISN’T JUST A PROBLEM PARTICULAR to modern Medellín; its potential as a truth serum was inadvertently discovered more than a century ago. In the early 20th century, doctors gave women tiny amounts of the drug during childbirth to help induce a state of “twilight sleep.” Physicians observed people under the effects of scopolamine become particularly candid. In 1922, Dallas obstetrician Robert House tested the drug on two prisoners and made a convincing case that it was impossible to conceal the truth while under scopolamine’s influence. They “cannot create a lie … and there is no power to think or reason,” he wrote.
A 1922 news report on the experiment in the Los Angeles Record seemingly coined the phrase “truth serum,” according to a declassified 1993 CIA report. In the first half of the 20th century, some U.S. police forces may have used scopolamine “extensively,” per the CIA report.
During World War II, scopolamine was used on prisoners of war to swiftly extract information not only, according to legend, by the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, but also by U.S. and U.K. intelligence services. The CIA then tested scopolamine during its MKUltra mind-control experiments in the 1950s. In 1963, the Supreme Court banned confessions given under scopolamine and other truth-inducers as unconstitutionally coerced.
Scopolamine was first used by criminals in Colombia in the 1970s, according to toxicologist Camilo Uribe, formerly a consultant to the country’s anti-narcotics police. It swiftly developed a reputation for producing a state of chemical hypnosis. “I can give you a gun and tell you to go kill someone and you will do it,” Uribe has said of scopolamine’s effects. Until the late 1990s, scopolamine was responsible for the majority of such druggings, but thieves learned it can make some people agitated and aggressive, complicating their efforts to rob them. Today, other drugs are more often deployed, chiefly benzodiazepines or the benzodiazepine Clonazepam, which also render a person zombie-like and more reliably submissive. Still, sometimes these drugs are combined with scopolamine. “Out of every 10 to 15 cases that enter emergency services, two or three may be a mixture of scopolamine with a tranquilizer,” says Uribe.
Scopolamine also has legitimate applications, and has been used to treat nausea and as palliative care for Parkinson’s patients. Some people even enjoy minute quantities as a recreational drug. Shamans, meanwhile, are known to consume the plant “to walk between worlds.”
Legitimate or otherwise, scopolamine is usually administered as a powder and is almost always dissolved in liquids. It blocks neurotransmitters regulating the flow of information to the part of the brain that records short-term memories, meaning that what happens after one has been “scopolamined” is not noted. “Scopolamine has a very short detection window,” says psychotherapist Augusto Pérez Goméz, a former member of a Colombian government commission on drug use, so instances of people being dosed with the drug often go unreported.
No matter which compound is actually used, many people in Colombia refer to these drugging-robberies as being “scopolamined.” But men trying to make sense of a night that has slipped clean out of memory — along with all their money — may find sympathy hard to come by.
“There is a group of people who, for me, are not tourists, they are sick and we must chase them wherever they are from,” Medellín Mayor Federico Gutiérrez said in 2024, highlighting the foreign tourists who come to Colombia to have sex with underage girls, after a Miami man was sentenced last year to life in prison for sexually abusing more than 50 minors after paying a local sex trafficker. In another widely-reported case in 2024, which led to a temporary city ban on sex work in Lleras Park, an Ohio man was found in a luxury hotel with two girls aged 12 and 13.
Gutiérrez acknowledged that drugging with scopolamine is a serious issue, but warned: “People go looking for what they should not be looking for.” And he called for Medellín not to be stigmatized: “It’s a beautiful city that has overcome some difficult times.”
The fruit and seeds of the brugmansia arborea tree, which is used for the production of scopolamine. RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP/Getty Images ON A TUESDAY EVENING IN FEBRUARY, I’M looking out over Lleras Park, a botanical oasis and center of the city’s sex industry. Dozens of women mill about beneath exotic trees to sell their services. It’s early, but a handful of men are already fraternizing with them, asking for their prices and what they would be prepared to do in return. Some of the girls are clearly underage, but the police officers nearby do not appear interested in asking them to prove their identities.
A tall, beautiful woman in a leopard-print catsuit blows me a kiss and motions for me to come over. She introduces herself as Camila and says she is from Colombia’s northern Caribbean coast. After exchanging pleasantries, she tells me: “Amor, hay un hotel donde podemos ir. (My love, there is a hotel where we can go).” An hour would be $110. Two would be $190, and the entire night would be $270. “We’re going to have a great time,” she assures me. “We can do todo.” In Spanish, I ask her if she might scopolamine me. She laughs and pushes me playfully in the shoulder to dismiss the idea. “Of course not,” she says. “I’m not that type of girl.”
Nearby, Americans in their sixties and seventies drunkenly solicit girls who barely look of age. As I order an Uber, I think of the men seeking sex on the streets of Medellín, and through the apps, who might not survive with their memory intact. I also wonder what sort of poverty, trauma, or outright intimidation might lead these women — Gutiérrez has warned that some of the women in Lleras park have been trafficked — to risk killing a man for his wallet.
Sex workers aren’t the only ones who are allegedly taking advantage of men by using these drugs James Doolin, a Texas businessman, 55, with slicked-back gray hair and bronze skin, met a woman on a dating app believing she wanted to date him.
Doolin welcomes me into his upscale Airbnb on the fifth floor of an apartment block a five-minute walk from Lleras Park. He says he met his ex-wife, who is 18 years younger than him, in Venezuela in 2015. But they divorced six years later, and now he is looking for a new partner. “Attractive women seem to be concentrated here, especially if you prefer Latinas, which I do,” says Doolin.
On Feb. 18, 2025, he said, he went for dinner with a stunning, dark-haired Colombian, who told him her name was Licet and she was 25 after they matched on Bumble. When they went back to his Airbnb with a bottle of champagne, he took precautions. “Just to be safe, I put my phone and my wallet in the safe, and I hid the key in the laundry room. I thought, ‘OK, if anything happens, she’s not gonna get anything.’”
They made small talk, danced, and kissed, and, he says, she asked to stay the night. “I said, ‘Yeah, that’s OK.’ And she excused herself to the bathroom.” When she came back out, she was in her bra. “She took my head, brought it to her chest, and I was out like that,” he recalls. “I believe she applied the drug in powder form to her chest.”
The next morning, he was rushed to hospital.“I guess she said, ‘Hey, go get the key’ and I went and got it, because when I came back to my senses the contents of the safe were missing,” he says. “The thing about that drug is you will do pretty much whatever they say.” His wallet and $1,500 had disappeared along with his phone and laptop. His knee was also badly cut after he fell on a glass shower door.
Doctors did not run a toxicology test, but Doolin believes it was scopolamine. It took him four days to start feeling like himself again, and despite a series of surgeries and experimental treatments, more than a year later, he still walks with a limp. “I’m probably going to need a partial knee replacement,” he says, showing me how the muscle in his left leg has wasted away without exercise. “In my mind, it was pretty much attempted murder.” Days after the incident, he reported her to the police. “Drugging me, that’s crossing another level. She left me there to die.”
Bart Mensink, a roofer from the Netherlands who visited Colombia in October 2025, says he lost far more money than Doolin — though he can still easily walk. Blue-eyed with a dark, coiffed beard, the 29-year-old travel blogger logged onto Tinder when he got to Medellín, and started asking his matches if they would like to make content with him for his YouTube channel. A supposedly 23-year-old woman named Caroli proposed various places to shoot footage, including a salsa class and a traditional restaurant, and so he went to meet her in Laureles, a neighborhood voted the coolest in the world by Time Out magazine in 2023.
“We talked about the plan for the night, and then after a while, she said, ‘Why don’t we order some food at your apartment?’” he says. At his Airbnb, located in a building with in-house security, he poured Bacardi and Cokes. “I take my glass, I take a sip, and from that moment, everything is gone,” he recalls. “I immediately knew when I drank it, I knew I got fucked.” A split second before he lost his memory, Mensink remembers looking at Caroli quizzically, “Like, what’s in the drink? That’s the last memory I have.”
The next thing Mensink remembers, it was two days later and all of his valuables were gone, including expensive camera gear and a drone. “I woke up, and I was like, ‘What the fuck happened?’” he says. “I felt like an old grandpa who lost his memory. I lost all my money, but I also lost the ability to think, the ability to speak.… If I had a drop more, I would have been dead for sure.” He stumbled out of his apartment and sought help from the police, but says they did not take him seriously. “The cops just think, ‘Oh, this is a sex tourist.’”
Mensink connected with his brother and was soon on a flight to meet him on the nearby island of Curaçao. There, according to the story he tells, he discovered his Binance cryptocurrency account, which had held around $116,000 in bitcoins, was empty. The only logical explanation was that he willingly provided the passcodes.
“I was devastated,” Mensink says. He felt like “an idiot,” and feared he would feel the same “for the rest of my life.” In a YouTube video five days after the incident, he was despondent. “The plan, now, is not to commit suicide,” he says in it. “Right now, I just really don’t know what to do with my life.” He never went to the hospital, but made another Tinder account on his new phone and swiped before his flight back to the Netherlands without finding her, until he fell asleep. “And then I woke up and the first swipe was her.” He posted photos of her profile on his YouTube and reported her to the police.
“It was like going from living the good life to a total dark place of depression,” he says. “I lost all my money.” He has since created a number of other videos about the episode on his monetized channel.
San Francisco native Steve Hamilton runs the YouTube channel Medellín Unfiltered. Though he’s never been drugged with scopolamine, he was sedated with benzodiazepines and robbed several years ago, and has devoted much of his channel to warning tourists about the risks. As I set about to discover whether I could find the drug, he tells me that scopolamine can be procured in an area in the center of Medellín known as the Bronx. “There’s an open-air drug market,” he says. “I never feel intimidated going places, but I’ve been there, and it’s the scariest place I’ve been to in South America — and I’ve been to Venezuela. It’s very dangerous.”
I ask a local taxi to go on a drive-through of the Bronx, past invisible lines the Uber drivers would not broach, and he agrees for the relatively high price of $4. The Bronx spans several blocks of Calle 56 and looks like a junkyard apocalypse. Trash is strewn everywhere; people addicted to the cheap stimulant basuco, derived from cocaine-production residue, lumber around in varying states of distress. As we drive through, every eyeball in the vicinity is fixed on our little yellow taxi, and I hastily roll up my window. I chat with the driver about the criminals who run the block. “They can drug you and rob you and put you in acid and disappear you,” he says.
Two drug dealers who appear to be in their forties approach our vehicle. I enquire whether scopolamine could be purchased in the Bronx. “Si, pero es muy delicado (Yes, but it’s a sensitive issue),” one of the men replies. “For scopolamine, it’s 12 years in jail,” he adds. To that end, he offers me a gram — enough to kill several people — for $30, but I would have to give him the money in cash and wait 15 minutes for his return with the goods.
Our taxi driver, nonchalantly smoking a joint, did not think this a wise idea. He believed we could be ambushed, attacked, and robbed. I duly requested that we get out of there — after all, I did not want any scopolamine, really — and the driver asked for an extra $4 for his trouble. I quickly handed it over.
Dozens of locals hanging out in the El Bronx neighborhood in Medellín, Colombia. Jan Sochor/Getty Images NEAR THE BRONX, IN A MODEST apartment above a convenience store, a sex worker named Maria showed the drug on camera as part of a 2024 documentary by British broadcaster Channel 4. Sitting on her bed in a sparsely furnished room, Maria’s face was blurred to protect her identity. She wore a white zip-front crop top beneath a black Adidas jacket, as well as surgical gloves. She admitted to drugging men with scopolamine and gave the presenter a mask so he did not accidentally inhale the substance. “If I get the measurements wrong, it will just kill them,” she said casually of her victims.
Maria claimed she’s worked for one of Medellín’s criminal gangs from age eight, as she showed the camera small white rocks of scopolamine, similar to crack cocaine. “With this single rock, I can put more than three or four people to sleep,” she said, wearing a mask, explaining she would make 100 times more money drugging and robbing than simply selling sex. Given that she works for a gang, however, she will never see much of the profit. Maria put a thimble-size piece of scopolamine into a liquid spray bottle and it quickly dissolved. “One spray and they’re out cold,” she told the interviewer. Asked if she ever killed anyone, she replied: “I hope not, but certainly it’s possible.”
Police reports from foreign men who claim they have been “scopolamined” have been increasing, according to Capt. Andrés Arboleda, head of theft for Medellín’s police. There were 443 cases last year, but in the first five months of 2026, there were 304 reports — suggesting the yearly number was set to spike. This increase was seemingly due to the rise in tourism and the targeting of foreign men by criminal groups. “Some ended up in hospitals, others collapsed in Airbnbs, others in hotels,” Arboleda says.
But the police also caution that many stories involving scopolamine verge on urban legend, and confirm that most criminals use other sedative drugs to manipulate their victims. “It’s very difficult to manufacture and administer,” Arboleda says. “If you exceed the proper dose, the person can be left like a baby, or die.” The aftereffects can be permanent, he warns. “I’ve known people who have been left in diapers.”
At Medellín City Hall, a hulking complex of concrete towers, where police and municipal officials work side by side, I meet with Medellín’s secretary of security, Manuel Villa, a lawyer by trade who is allied with the mayor’s center-right political movement. In June last year, a group of three women, Las Mamacitas, were arrested after allegedly drugging men they had met on dating apps and through social media with scopolamine, but it is unclear whether police were able to confirm the use of the drug. “We continue to dismantle criminal networks that use cowardly methods such as scopolamine,” Villa said in a press release at the time.
“We are going after those who try to use seduction to camouflage their crime. We will not allow groups like this to continue operating with impunity,” he said.
In March 2025, police arrested five women who initially were alleged to have used scopolamine to steal more than 600,000,000 pesos — about $160,000 — from 23 foreigners from countries including the U.S., Australia, Germany, and Norway. Authorities started calling the group Las Barbies, who they said primarily operated out of Lleras Park, but it later emerged that the group used the antipsychotic drug Clonazepam to drug their victims. The case has yet to reach trial. “It’s been going on for a long time,” Villa tells me of the issue. “We’ve chosen to make it visible so we can confront it.”
Though grateful he survived, Doolin remains frustrated that the police still have not caught his attacker. He put up posters around Lleras Park offering a $5,000 reward for information alongside photos of Licet with red lipstick and thick eyebrows. Doolin soon discovered her real name, actual age — which was a few years younger than she had claimed — and parents’ address, which he passed to police at the end of last year, but he is still awaiting further action. “I hope the police find her before I do,” he says.
Mensink, meanwhile, is traveling through Europe and North Africa with nearly no money — unwilling to give up his dream of being a travel vlogger. In a recent Instagram post on what he now calls his “Travel No Money” journey, he was seen accepting a free ride from a 12-year-old Moroccan child. “The money is gone, but I’m still alive,” he tells me.
In late March, however, an American man died after a night out in Medellín. Eric Fernando Gutiérrez Molina, 32, was a flight attendant passing through the city. Molina went out with a co-worker, but they became separated and the co-worker later returned to their hotel “somewhat disoriented,” Villa told reporters. Molina was found dead days later, some 50 miles south of where they were staying. Villa says it’s clear Molina encountered people “with a history of committing theft” with scopolamine.
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The number of foreign men who have been killed in suspicious or downright violent circumstances in Medellín in recent years continues to grow. According to reports, Jean Roody Dagobert, a 36-year-old American, died in late June after spending the night with women he and his friends met in Lleras Park. A video appears to show one of the women exiting from the man’s apartment by jumping from a second-floor window.
But many visitors, like Mark, don’t report the criminals who drug and almost kill them. Toxicologist Fernández has stayed in touch with his patient and still winces about how Mark feared reporting the crime to the police could reflect poorly on him professionally. He says Mark is still coping with long-term effects. “He suffered major memory impairment, as well as difficulty concentrating and making decisions,” says Fernández. “It almost cost him his life.”
Contributors: Edinson Arroyo
