Another day, another bizarre drug craze -- this time, in Pakistan.
A man named Sohbat Khan has been making headlines for his obscure, cringeworthy alleged drug addiction. No, it isn't K2 or Molly. It's something you'd never suspect...
Khan claims he is addicted to scorpion venom.
According to Scroll.In, the 74-year-old, based in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, has apparently been getting high off scorpion venom since the 1960s.
Khan's drug tale came to light after a tell-all story in the Pakistan-based Dawn newspaper appeared last month where he revealed his struggle with scorpion venom addiction.
As Khan says, when he wasn't able to find scorpions in his village, he would travel over four hours to Peshawar.
Despite the fact that Khan never expressed Pakistan's legal views on using scorpion venom to get high, he did go into detail about how a scorpion is turned into a drug for consumption.
The story reveals,
A dead scorpion is first dried in the sunlight or burnt on coal. The coal is kept on a traditional stove, and the scorpion is allowed to cook until it burns to death.
At that point, Khan would inhale the hazardous, poisonous fumes emitting from the burning scorpion.
Depending on the user's method of consumption, the high could last anywhere from 6 to 10 hours. First-time users are said to experience 5-6 hours of pure misery before slipping into total bliss after their bodies adjust to the new high.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the epitome of WTF material. Khan describes the high as,
Everything appears like it is dancing. The roads, the vehicles, everything in front of me.
Long-term effects of scorpion venom inhalation include short and long-term memory loss, extreme hallucination and a near-permanent state of delusion, which signifies how damaging this stuff really is to the human brain.
Perhaps one of the most interesting things about this obscure drug addiction is the lack of official data drug researchers and organizations have on scorpion venom. This is primarily due to the fact that most users are hard to detect and are typically very secretive about their usage which, overall, makes the addiction difficult to study.
Regardless, the people of Pakistan are fully aware of the country's lack of laws to reduce the killing and smoking of scorpions.
A former service worker at Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's narcotics control department, says of the story,
We need laws in place to stop the killing of scorpions.
But, he didn't say this for the obvious reasons you might think.
See, scorpions are typically used to create medicines and vaccines that treat diseases and chronic illnesses like cancer and AIDS. If scorpions continue to be used by addicts to get high, this could mean insufficient additives for life-saving medicines.
Citations: Smoking dead scorpions is the latest addiction in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Scroll.In), Smoking dead scorpions is KP's latest dangerous addiction (Dawn)
