In the 1980s the ethnobotanist Wade Davis proposed, in a widely read book and popular film adaptation, that a real pharmacological basis lay behind reports of zombification, arguing that a bokor-prepared powder containing tetrodotoxin, a potent neurotoxin found in pufferfish, could induce a death-like state from which a victim might later be revived and kept in a drugged, compliant condition. The claim drew wide public attention because it offered a scientific explanation for a phenomenon usually dismissed outright as folklore.
Subsequent toxicological and pharmacological review found the proposed dosing implausible and the evidence for a reliable, reproducible zombification formula unconvincing, and the claim is now generally regarded by scientists as unsupported rather than confirmed, though the episode remains a notable case study in how a real cultural category, the bokor as the practitioner most associated in outside imagination with sorcery and the zonbi, attracted a scientific investigation whose popular fame considerably outran its actual evidential standing among specialists in the relevant sciences.
Haiti's 2003 recognition of Vodou as an official religion did not extend any specific protection or standing to sorcery for hire, and communities that identify a member as a bokor rather than a legitimate houngan or mambo can impose real social consequences, including refusal of ordinary communal ceremonial support and, in serious cases, exclusion from the customary funeral rites a family would otherwise expect, so the tradition's own moral boundary carries practical social teeth beyond simple reputation.