The woman was “beautiful”. Maybe a lot in fact… that’s what Israeli immigrant Omar Bloch remembers after a Tinder date in the Colombian city of Medellin. The “handsome” in question robbed him after putting him to sleep with a powerful local drug mixed in his glass of beer. The substance, scopolamine, which has been renamed “thieves’ drug” is known to local authorities. “I just remember wanting to kiss his neck. And then clack. Big black hole, says the 28-year-old businessman. I woke up with no memory. I had trouble getting out of bed. It looked like I was drunk.” When Omar looked around his apartment, he noticed that his iPad, wallet and credit cards were missing.
Like him, dozens of foreign tourists also suffered the same fate. William Vivas Loreda, ombudsman of the Medellin district, cites 300 cases of people robbed by the scheme. Scopolamine, extracted from the fruit of a tree called Brugmansia, is known for its psychotropic effects. Criminals secretly mix it into their victims’ drinks or sometimes throw the powder in their faces. The effect is immediate and results in an almost complete loss of willpower, a form of torpor that turns you into a vegetable that can be molded at will. In large doses and combined with alcohol, scopolamine can be fatal.
With its lively reggaeton-based nightlife and legal prostitution, Medellin, notorious for drug-trafficking violence in the 1990s, has become a mecca for global sex tourism. The “city of eternal spring”, with 2.6 million inhabitants, attracts Tinder flirts every weekend who “drop like flies by the handful”, says an American diplomatic source. In early January, the United States Embassy also published a warning after the “suspicious” deaths of eight Americans between November and December 2023 and recommended against using dating apps in Colombia.
