Women Film Themselves Smelling Flower, Turns Out to Be 'World's Scariest Drug'

TikTok user @songsbyralph shared what began as a sweet moment with a friend, only to turn into a much darker story, involving "the world's scariest drug."

The video, shared by singer Raffaela Weyman, known professionally as RALPH, showed her and a friend innocently smelling flowers found in a bush on Sunset Boulevard.

"I was walking along Sunset Boulevard with my best friend, we had drank a couple glasses of wine at a friends' birthday party and we were just in a silly mood," Weyman told Newsweek via email on Tuesday.

"The flowers were growing on a tree right in front of us and they were so huge and so intoxicating, we couldn't help ourselves. We're both from Canada so [it] isn't a flower native to our homeland, we'd never seen them before and found them so beautiful."

However, the story took a darker turn, when the women claim to have begun feeling "f**ked up," later in the night.

"Me and my BFF found this beautiful flower and spent the night deeply inhaling its smell," she wrote. "When we arrived at our friend's bday, we both suddenly felt so f**ked up, and had to leave."

"When I got home and fell asleep, I had the craziest dreams and experienced sleep paralysis for the first time in my life," she added.

Weyman told Newsweek that she began to feel unwell when they arrived at another friend's backyard gathering.

"I started to feel really unbalanced and unable to socialize, my legs felt tired and the ground felt uneven. My best friend was also feeling odd so we left and went to our separate homes. I went to bed and had my first sleep paralysis experience - I thought a human entered my room dressed in black, and sat next to me injecting me with a needle that made me unable to talk or scream or move. I was just lying there making quiet moaning sounds."

"I did eventually wake up from that and was able to move and get my voice back, and eventually went back to sleep around 3 AM and had a bunch of wild dreams and nightmares. I don't remember them anymore, but I recall they all had a feeling of vivid, rich colours," she said.

The flower Weyman and her friend had been smelling was actually angel's trumpet, which is regularly used as a hallucinogen. Often, the flower is brewed as a tea or the leaves are dried and smoked.

Angel's trumpet contains large amounts of belladonna alkaloids, which include atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine. Scopolamine, which is also known as "Devil's Breath" has a large reputation as being extremely dangerous and is often used to commit crimes in Colombia.

In 2012, Vice filmed a popular documentary on scopolamine, and dubbed it the "world's scariest drug," describing it as the "worst roofie you can ever imagine times a million."

Vice spoke to Colombia toxicologist Dra. Miriam Gutierrez, who explained that it's perfect for crimes, as the drug has the ability to turn victims into a hypnotized zombie-like state but wont knock them out or affect the ability to speak, making them even willing to help the perpetrators commit the crime on themselves—often robbery or sexual assault. The victim also doesn't remember anything the next day, and so won't report it to the police.

When used by criminals, the "Devil's Breath" is extracted from the plant, rather than ingested with the flower. Often, it will be turned into a pill or powder form, and criminals are even able to blow the powder in the victim's face, or have them unknowingly move their face close to it and accidentally inhale it.

After waking up the next morning, Weyman turned to Google to discover exactly what kind of plant she had been smelling in the TikTok video, after friends saw her Instagram posts with it.

"We had posted a video on our Instagram stories of us smelling the flower, and woke up the next day to tons of responses from friends saying 'That's a REALLY poisonous flower, are you okay!!??' We googled it and I read different articles about its potential to cause paralysis and hallucinations. I've never in my life had sleep paralysis so I concluded that it must have been a result of the flower, which I was walking with and deeply inhaling for about 30 minutes," she told Newsweek.

"Turns out the flower is super poisonous and we accidentally drugged ourselves like idiots," she wrote.

Reportedly, most symptoms of the plant are caused by directly ingesting it, but according to Queensland Health, "the perfume can cause respiratory irritation, headaches, nausea, and light-headedness."

"I was completely freaked out," said Weyman. "As a flower lover, I feel like I've learned my lesson - Google before you touch or smell that foreign species."

Update 6/30/21, 03:26 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Raffaela Weyman