See also The Ethiopian government confirms that it has recaptured cities from the Tigray rebels The victim voluntarily consumes some substance and there is a predator that takes advantage of her state, ”explains the expert.
“90% of the cases would be included in opportunistic chemical submission. Many media illustrated the news with the hand of a man surreptitiously pouring a drug into a glass at a bar counter, but Bravo draws another, more common scenario. The Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop, declared on March 8 that one in three sexual assaults in Spain it is committed with the victim under chemical submission, according to a preliminary estimate based on unpublished data from the INTCF. “It is conceivable that the use of burundanga or scopolamine in our environment is much less than that referred to by the media and social networks in general,” they state in their conclusions, published on the Spanish Journal of Legal Medicine. Sometimes we have insisted on explaining that we do not see burundanga, but they say that there isīravo and his colleagues are forceful.
What was the largest study to date, an analysis of some 150 suspected cases received at the INTCF between 20, found no trace of burundanga. “Since 2012, scopolamine has been searched for in all samples from suspected cases and we did not detect it,” says Bravo. The reality, as Bravo explains, is that his laboratory -in the Madrid municipality of Las Rozas- has since 2010 equipment that is sensitive enough to find this drug, but there are hardly any confirmed cases.
Urban legend holds that the substance disappears so quickly from blood and urine that scientists are unable to detect it. The researchers found scopolamine in his urine, the active ingredient in burundanga, a concoction of plant extracts, such as jimsonweed. The patient assured that, after having taken a few beers, he woke up at home alone and disoriented, with no evidence of having suffered a sexual assault, but some of his belongings were stolen. The only proven burundanga poisoning is that of a 34-year-old man who had stayed at home with a twenty-something he had just met on a dating app, one day in January 2020. The new work has examined 292 cases registered in the last seven years in one of top 25 hospitals from Spain, the San Carlos Clinic in Madrid. Researchers have only found burundanga in one of these events, 0.3% of the total. His team has just participated in one of the largest studies to date, a review of almost 300 suspected cases of “chemical submission”: people who came to the ER and reported possible exposure to substances that altered their will and facilitated a robbery or a sex crime. “It seems that it has a touch of mystery that is better in the headline, because sometimes we have insisted on explaining that we do not see burundanga, but they say that there is,” laments Bravo, head of the Chemistry Service of the National Institute of Toxicology and Sciences Forensics (INTCF), the main reference center for analyzing samples sent by Spanish hospitals. To the pharmacist Begona Bravo he is puzzled by the fascination with the burundanga of some media.