Drug Time

aruna · Apr 20, 2006

I need a drug with which a malicious person can keep another person in a drowsy, zombie-like state over months, without break. The drug has to be not too hard to obtain, and preferably administered in capsule form. Oh, and this is in the late 70's, so nothing new-fangled.
Any experts here? Thanks in advance!

poetinahat · Apr 20, 2006

television...
sorry, can't be any real help. hope you find what you need!

alleycat · Apr 20, 2006

One of the barbiturates should do the trick; they were certainly readily available in the seventies on the street. You could just refer to the pills as "downers". Or perhaps you could use pentobarbital stolen from a vet's office. I'm not sure however, you'd have to do more research.

ac

Tornadoboy · Apr 21, 2006

Bacardi rum and diet coke, I've lost a few months to those...

Ok, seriously now, I think there's a drug called Thorazine that when given in the higher dose range to dangerous psychiatric patients it totally zombies them out, but I'm by no means an expert, and I can't vouch for where and when its available.

waylander · Apr 21, 2006

Valium

Jaycinth · Apr 21, 2006

and valerian tea mixed with some opium powder or codene. . .

Perks · Apr 21, 2006

Quaalude was very popular then. Relaxation and euphoria in recommended doses, sedation to even catatonia in larger doses or mixed with alcohol.

Cheryll · Apr 21, 2006

Hi, Aruna!

Tornadoboy is right about Thorazine. It was introduced in the 1950's to treat severe catatonic states, as depicted in the movie Awakenings with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.

It might do the trick, although it's actually categorized as an antipsychotic and not a sedative. If you're wanting to induce a constant state of sedation, Thorazine would be tricky to get the dosage right. They can range anywhere from 100mg - 800mg, depending on the severity of the patient, and there's no guarantee it would automatically cause sedation, even with the higher doses. Side effects are also pretty bad such as critical drops in blood pressure and Parkinson-like tremors.

Halcion (Triazolam) is a sleep medication that would most assuredly induce sedation. But there are some nasty side effects associated with it (hallucinations, psychosis, severe personality changes, etc) and it wasn't approved by the FDA until 1980. Is that too late?

I'm thinking your best bet might be Valium (Diazepam). It's been around since the early 60s, it's readily available, and it's a depressant that can induce sedation in larger doses. Major drawback would be dependency, which is pretty common with Valium. Dosage would be from 2mg - 10mg, up to 4 times a day. Side effects are usually less common that with some other sedatives.

Hope that helps!

Cheryll

Julie Worth · Apr 21, 2006

Zombies! Try GHB, a safe and happy drug outlawed by our evil government.

rich · Apr 21, 2006

A number of them are good. Tip, try to pick a perscription drug. That way you can go to an online chain pharmacy and find the generic names, drug interactions, contraindications, proper dosage and improper dosage, etc.

Paint · Apr 21, 2006

Cough syrup might work. Could be mixed with a sweet drink.

aruna · Apr 21, 2006

Thanks to everyone, I seem to have quite a big choice. Of them all, Valium seems perfect; can it be administred in capsules? Side effetcs such as dependency don't matter in this case, as the intent is malicious. The patient, by the way, is perfectly healthy at the time.

Cheryll · Apr 21, 2006

aruna said:
Thanks to everyone, I seem to have quite a big choice. Of them all, Valium seems perfect; can it be administred in capsules?

Absolutely.

Tish Davidson · Apr 21, 2006

It also comes in a liquid form that can be mixed with foods like applesauce. The generic name is diazepam. There is a short, non-technical description here.
http://www.answers.com/topic/diazepam

ColoradoGuy · Apr 24, 2006

Don't forget that Valium, like all members of the benzodiazepine class (Ativan, Versed, Librium, others), induces tolerance to a given dose, sometimes quite quickly (over 1-2 weeks), so you would need to increase the dose to achieve the same effect. Those effects are also quite variable from person to person for a given dose. One effect that you might find useful is that these drugs interfere with processing of short-term memory and often cause some degree of amnesia for recent events.

I agree that thorazine would not be a good choice. We rarely use it now and its sedating effects are quite unpredictable. You might want to consider haloperidol (Haldol). It is an anti-psychotic that has been around since the late 1950s. It has some of the side-effects of thorazine, plus a few others, but haldol comes as an odorless, tasteless liquid that one can easly spike food with; this was commonly done in nursing homes years ago to keep the old folks quiet.

I still use haldol now and then for a truly crazy, out of control psychotic person -- nothing knocks them flat like a haldol injection. Combined with librium, we call the mixture a "B-52" for the way that it carpet-bombs their level of consciousness.

jst5150 · Apr 24, 2006

Sleeping pills have been around a while. If your character is sly enough, he could ration the dosages to be enough to enduce stupor for months on end (like the last three seasons of "Friends")

RobD7 · Apr 24, 2006

Psilocybin Mushroom Tea

Very 70's and super easy to get! Or so I am told.I can see the cow pasture scene now.

Billytwice · Apr 24, 2006

Ketamine.

But it could leave the victim feeling a 'little horse.'

ColoradoGuy · Apr 24, 2006

Billytwice said:
Ketamine.'

No. Oral absorbtion is unreliable and duration of action is short.

aruna · Apr 25, 2006

Thanks again!
I thought I'd give a few more details of the plot situarion, so maybe we can find the perfect stuff.
This woman, as I said, is drugged by a maliscious adversary, and kept in a dopey state of mind over months. A friend is trying to help her.
I first thought of having this friend take apart the capsules, fill them with something harmless like flour, reclose them and substitute for the real thing (she has access to the medicines). With a bit of rewriting, however, the food could also be spiked.

The drugged person would then have to pretend to be drugged for a while, until an opportunity to escape arises. Would dependency on, say, valium prohibit this? Can you help? Or is the whole scenario too outlandish?

ColoradoGuy · Apr 25, 2006

It's all a little outlandish, but the bottom line is that drugs work in unpredictable ways in some people, so some artistic license would be OK. My issue with Valium is that many, many people walk around under the influence of drugs in that class and are not obviously drugged. Still, if you increased the dose to say 10 mg three to four times per day you would certainly drug someone in the short term. As their body became accustomed to the drug, however, they would escape from this effect to a variable extent. On the other hand, this could be your plot device, with the same dose producing progressively less sedation over time and the person becoming more aware of what was going on.

If you do use Valium, you would need to crush the pills: they are not capsules. Also, at that dose and for that duration your character would definitely experience symptoms of drug withdrawal when the Valium was stopped: agitation, irritability, even frank hallucinations like alcohol withdrawal DTs. The drug needs to be tapered slowly to prevent this. That would be a problem for your plot, I suspect. Valium is also easily picked up in a standard urine drug screen test, if that matters to your plot.

There is no perfect drug for what you want, unless you invent one. As I noted, I prefer Haldol as the most plausible drug for your scenario.

aruna · Apr 25, 2006

Could haldol simply be given in a glass of water?
If it's an odorless, clear liquid should also be easy to replace?

ColoradoGuy said:
It's all a little outlandish, but the bottom line is that drugs work in unpredictable ways in some people, so some artistic license would be OK. My issue with Valium is that many, many people walk around under the influence of drugs in that class and are not obviously drugged. Still, if you increased the dose to say 10 mg three to four times per day you would certainly drug someone in the short term. As their body became accustomed to the drug, however, they would escape from this effect to a variable extent. On the other hand, this could be your plot device, with the same dose producing progressively less sedation over time and the person becoming more aware of what was going on.

If you do use Valium, you would need to crush the pills: they are not capsules. Also, at that dose and for that duration your character would definitely experience symptoms of drug withdrawal when the Valium was stopped: agitation, irritability, even frank hallucinations like alcohol withdrawal DTs. The drug needs to be tapered slowly to prevent this. That would be a problem for your plot, I suspect. Valium is also easily picked up in a standard urine drug screen test, if that matters to your plot.

There is no perfect drug for what you want, unless you invent one. As I noted, I prefer Haldol as the most plausible drug for your scenario.

ColoradoGuy · Apr 25, 2006

aruna said:
Could haldol simply be given in a glass of water?
If it's an odorless, clear liquid should also be easy to replace?

Yes. It comes as a 2 mg/mL solution. To get the effect that you want I would give (for an adult-sized person) 6 mg (3 mL) twice each day. Haldol does have some side effects: it can produce a syndrome sort of like Parkinson's Disease with a fine tremor of the hands, shuffling gait, and decreased fine motor abilities. Patients who take it often describe feeling "dull" or "slow," but that may be just what your plot needs. It might even help if the victim actually thought that they were getting Parkinson's; after all, that is a common disorder and many folks know someone with it. If I started to tremble and feel stiff it would never occur to me that my wife might be slipping haldol into my coffee.

aruna · Apr 25, 2006

ColoradoGuy said:
Yes. It comes as a 2 mg/mL solution. To get the effect that you want I would give (for an adult-sized person) 6 mg (3 mL) twice each day. Haldol does have some side effects: it can produce a syndrome sort of like Parkinson's Disease with a fine tremor of the hands, shuffling gait, and decreased fine motor abilities. Patients who take it often describe feeling "dull" or "slow," but that may be just what your plot needs. It might even help if the victim actually thought that they were getting Parkinson's; after all, that is a common disorder and many folks know someone with it. If I started to tremble and feel stiff it would never occur to me that my wife might be slipping haldol into my coffee.

Those symptoms sound perfect, though the patient is under 30 so Parkinson's is unlikely. But this sounds really good. Only thing, they probably would use ml/mg back in the 70's, right? So what would it be in ounces?

ColoradoGuy · Apr 25, 2006

We would use mL and mg:apothecary units (e.g. ounces, drams, minims, grains) have not been used since the 1950s. There were some really old docs around in the 70s (my dad, for one) who still used those terms (it drove nurses and pharmacists crazy), but it was archaic by then. If you want to use that, though, 30 mL = 1 ounce.

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