Essex police spread urban legend

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 28 Nov 2008 at 11:57

A classic urban legend surrounding drugged business cards has been revived by Essex police.

Simon Lofting, a detective constable with Essex police, heard a retelling of an old urban legend that involved a woman being handed a business card soaked in a drug called burundanga, designed to render her unconscious.

The story failed to name the woman, and was told from a third-person perspective, but was nonetheless a worrying tale. Diligently, he handed the information over to the intelligence unit at the police department, but failed to give the topic a quick Google first.

Had he done so, he would have seen several hundred results reporting the story as a myth. At the time of writing, the first three results for "burundanga" include articles on urbanlegends.about.com, hoax-slayer.com and the popular urban legend repository, snopes.com.

Unfortunately, his email subsequently leaked to the public, and has since been seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Even more unfortunately, the email has been forwarded on with his phone number and email address still attached, encouraging circulation by adding authority to the story, but also allowing hundreds of worried members of the public to get in touch with him to ask how to protect themselves from the fictional threat.

"Given that burundanga can't be introduced into a victim the way this tale would have it and that no one else has reported similar encounters, we have to say it's false," says the article on snopes.com, which has since been amended to include mention of Lofting and his spurring on of the myth.