K.J. Jones, Author
This series is dedicated to and inspired by combat vets who wanted a zombie that might challenge them a bit more.
Life Imitates Art
Let's talk zombie drugs to understand how authorities (media, government) could claim a new designer street drug was causing the mayhem in Wilmington, North Carolina and people believed it…at least initially.
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R140 is based on true events primarily occurring in 2012. Zombie drugs, in case you haven’t heard, is a real-life term that was originally used for synthetic cathinone drugs (street names bath salts; flakka, gravel, etc.). Bath salts was the first of the zombie drugs, and it initially exploded onto the streets of Florida.
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Flakka is a synthetic of the plant khat, which was used heavily by many insurgents. US Troops fighting in the Middle East openly called users ‘zombies’ because of their life-imitating-art behavior.
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In 2012, an outbreak of ‘zombies’ occurred. For real. Well, sort of for real. Respectable journalists asked, “Is the zombie apocalypse happening?” It grew so bad that the CDC reassured people the zombie apocalypse was not happening. (For real, the CDC had to reassure people! That is way too bizarre for any fiction author to come up with.)
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However, the CDC representative only stated, “The flesh-eating living dead don't actually exist”.
Who said anything about dead people? There was no acknowledgment of the non-dead people behaving like they had the viruses in the movies 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, and Quarantine.
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Though some insist the z-word only refers to the living dead created by George Romero—apparently, including the CDC—nobody cares about semantics when a crazy, hyper-strong dude is busting through the window with his forehead. The synthetic cathinone users growl. They drool. They look wild-eyed. They run. They love to bite. They strip off their clothes from tachycardia-induced body heat. And they can take bullets without response, feeling no pain (analgesia). The z-word correlation is largely due to the zombie fiction subgenre created by 28 Days Later in 2002. For those infected with the ‘Rage’ virus in the movie, the above is a good description of their behavior, except less stripping off of clothes.
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Middle-aged women were caught on camera doing the demoness-striptease mentioned in Book One. Peter’s “Crazy Tits” story came from a real video of a woman on bath salts.
Indeed, the author watched video footage while describing the zoms in the story, so if things seem to ring a bell of familiarity, that’s why. It is supposed to be familiar.
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The media had a field day with the ‘real’ zombies. They declared repeatedly it was bath salts causing everything, including a man eating another man in Miami (Rudy Eugene). A cop had to shoot him several times to stop him until fatal, just like in the movies and what Officer Mazy had to do. Except for… oopsy, no cathinone drugs in the toxicology report of Eugene. The media buried the toxicology report in the back pages.
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Several of the ‘bath salt zombies’ were found to also lack cathinone drugs in their system or anything else that would explain their life-imitating-art behavior. This included a Chinese bus driver who dove at a woman and bit her face—he was only on alcohol. No answers were given on what was with these people—except for psychiatrists stating they randomly erupted into ‘excited delirium’ (an acute confusional state marked by intense paranoia, hallucinations, and violence toward objects and people). If people were randomly exploding into excited delirium, why was this the only time we’ve heard of it happening? Why were they imitating the alive-infected zombie movies?
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The whole issue disappeared! No more coverage of people not on the drugs doing things. It was never answered about why they abruptly broke into excited delirium.
Take a look via YouTube videos:
Flakka: The Designer Drug Destroying Communities—Simon Whistler’s Into the Shadows YouTube channel.
Flakka/Bath Salt Zombie In Lynn Massachusetts
'Bath Salts' Causing 'Excited Delirium'? ABC News 2012 (tells of the lack of pain response; mentions Miami cannibal)
Hear Desperate 911 Call From Fraternity Brother Face-Eating Incident Inside Edition 2016 (frat boy who eats man’s face)
What caused all those people not on synthetic cathinone drugs to suddenly explode into excited delirium, to the point of face biting and cannibalism? Why did it happen at the same time and in different countries?
A hiccup: their behavior has a lot in common with the furious stage of rabies-like lyssaviruses in human beings. Read “The Basis for R140 – It’s Not So Fictional”.
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A peruse of what’s going on out there in internet land, and we learn the media has tranq (xylazine) as The Zombie Drug, deleting the whole synthetic cathinone history from which the moniker of ‘zombie’ came. People are referring to tranq as “the zombie drug,” not as “a zombie drug.” The history is disappearing.
Being ever suspicious of the establishment through firsthand experience, I wonder why tranq is “the zombie drug” now. Since events during the 2012 “zombie apocalypse” included many of the worst cases committed by individuals who were not taking the substance and no answers were given, it raises a brow now, doesn’t it?
K.J.
(Please drop an email to the author if links are dead at KJJonesing@gmail.com.)