[Part VII] Drugs, Theology, Society: All You Zombi, Hide Your Faces!

(Updated, stet June 16 2009 11PM)

Earlier, we covered the fact that school's out for summer and kids and skateboards need a place.

Later we went moving right along with a little juxtaposition of cognitive dissonance of single moms in poverty (PDF) and suburban singles bars and why I don't date, but dance as if I do.

Then I decided that -- as is proper form in all good Rhetoric -- I should Digress, with an actual schizothemia, no less, that being "digression by means of a long reminiscence". Yet bracketing that schizothemia, I did stop to mention that nearly ubiquitous functional illiteracy even among college graduates makes it difficult for me to communicate at my own level with others.

I forgot to mention that me being located a little bit on the autism spectrum probably doesn't help. Just try to keep in mind that I am not an idiot to be managed. See also Amendment 14 Section 1, US Constitution as amended and a long train of SCOTUS decisions.

And lastly, I mentioned disturbing parallels between recurring plot-lines of some very good science fiction and definite historic and horrid incidents, trying to keep the focus on Focus and how people might get rich or powerful from that, and how scruples might not matter to some people. Then, noted in passing, an article that points out that the death-rate from kids on Ritalin is nearly octuple that of accident victims in the same population group.

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Push the play button, and listen as you read:


In his excellent 1985 book (read the reviews) the Serpent and the Rainbow, ethnobotanist Wade Davis explores how the combination of culture, society, faith, and a toxin -- Tetrodotoxin (as well as other interesting plant-source psychoactives -- all combine in Haitian tradition to create "Zombi".

Leaving aside, for now, the religious elements, the long and short of it is this:

Small time criminals, shiftless losers, and the sort of people who beat their spouses or children or elders excessively, are drugged near to the point of death. Then after a great deal of ceremony above-ground, the victim imprisoned is left to stew in a mixture of their own belief system and suggestibility and the effects of a variety of potent hallucinogens, not the least of which is the near-death coma of near-fatal tetrodotoxin poisoning.

Upon release from the buried box, the clearly addled victim is taken away for additional inculcation into their new lot in life: a brain-damaged laborer.

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How, exactly, this will differ from our modern American system of public mental healthcare?

Really, only in the choice of the drugs used.

In Haiti, serious crimes are punishable by death, and the least serious crimes are punished mostly by a whipping or a fine. There is a vast gulf of possible misbehavior in between, and little degree of punishment between a fine and a guillotine. Some additional penalty had to evolve to fill the gap, and the most shiftless and recurrent of repeat offenders get sentenced to become zombi.

Professor Davis's book -- available to the public for over 20 years now -- gives excellent historic references and citations to earlier works. It is his easily supported position that the institution of the zombi inevitably evolved out of the means of control by which the coastal West African slave trading people kept their far more numerous prisoners in line: drugs. Nasty horrid drugs.

Professor Davis gives excellent and really quite gentle and friendly coverage to Vodun (also known as "Vodoun" or "Voodoo") and also to the history of Haiti, including the rather worrisome first night or two of the Revolution. His coverage of the evolution of the African native faiths involving the veneration of Orisha is both comprehensive and comprehensible.

Particularly enlightening are the bits of priestly practice which migrated into the Americas to become other religions, such elements of subculture as the "coup l'aire" ("striking through air"), the "coup-poudre" ("striking with powder") and even such things as Goofer Dust.

Folks should read this book... and all of the footnotes. And then research the plant-source chemicals from which many -- if not most -- of our modern psychoactive pharmakin is derived... many of which are well referenced in the footnotes of this scholarly work by a Harvard graduate.

And then they should go down the the public mental healthcare clinics in even the most upscale jurisdictions...

And then tell me where, exactly, is the difference between the "modern scientific pharmacological regiment" and the rural herbalists of Haiti, when both produce the exact same thing: drugged-out unskilled labor... that can barely get up in the morning, and has less functionality than the average brain-trauma victim.

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