A bizarre revelation has been made about people who smoke scorpions as cigarettes in South Asia.
It may indeed sound very bizarre but smoking scorpions is not unheard of in South Asian countries, and according to regional media, the practice has recently been gaining popularity in several parts of Pakistan.
The scorpion venom can apparently put the smoker on an intense high, becoming highly addictive with time.
So how does one smoke a scorpion, anyway? It’s a simple yet effective process – a dead scorpion is dried in sunlight for several hours or a live one is burnt on coal until it dies. The dried carcass is then lit on fire and the smoke is inhaled. Since it’s the tail that contains the poison addicts seek, some smokers prefer to crush the dried tail and mix it with hashish and tobacco, smoking it in the form of a cigarette.
In his 2007 book, Drugs in Afghanistan, sociologist David MacDonald provides the account of a friend who witnessed first-hand the effects of scorpion smoke on an addict. nd eyes becoming very red, much more than a hashish smoker. He also seemed very intoxicated but awake and alert, although he stumbled and fell over when he tried to rise from a sitting position … the smoke tasted “sweeter” than that of hashish, although … it smelled foul, and the intoxicating effect lasted much longer,” the book suggested.
The high, it seems, lasts for as long as 10 hours. The first six are said to be painful as the body adjusts to the substance, but the feeling slowly eases into enjoyment and later, intense pleasure.
“Everything appears like it is dancing,” recalled Sohbat Khan, a 74-year-old former scorpion smoker. “The roads, the vehicles, everything in front of me.”
Sohbat was addicted to scorpion smoke as a young man in his 20s – he would purchase the arachnid for one or two rupees apiece from a vendor, who got his stash from Peshawar’s Matani area, rich in scorpions because of the hot weather.
At the height of his addiction, he would scour the land of his village, hunting for scorpions to smoke. When the need was overwhelming and there were none to be found, he would actually travel all the way to Peshawar, in Afghanistan, to get some.
“It was the worst form of addiction,” he said.
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