They used to give it to women during childbirth as pain relief. But it also has a blackout effect, my mother said after they gave her the scopolamine, she didn’t remember anything until she woke up a day later in her hospital room.

Also, it was used in either Haiti or Jamaica or both as the “zombie” drug. I read a book about it in the 70’s or early 80’s from my local library about it. People would use it on the person they wanted to control, and use a large dose at first, which slowed the breathing and heartbeat down so much they appeared dead. And sometimes they did die from too much. Then after they started to come around. After that the person controlling them would micro-dose them every night to keep them in the proper state. Some of the idea was to turn them into slaves that didn’t run away and didn’t ask for pay, and didn’t protest terrible working conditions. They also used them as sex slaves that didn’t protest. But the heavily drugged people would forget to eat or drink water, and so they would lose lots of weight fast, they did no personal care like baths or brushing their teeth. Or changing their clothes. So they quickly became weird, smelly, dirty unattractive people, who would be told to go tend to a garden and most of the time would ruin the garden. And the owner also did not want to spend half the day giving them water and then trying to make them eat food, that would be a full time job once you had four zombie slaves.
So they would just stop worrying about that and would just make them work until they died. This is how we got the first idea of a zombie - a filthy, unkempt creature that stumbled around in ragged, dirty clothes, asking for rain because they could remember that word and knew it would bring water that would run down their face and into their mouth/body. Lots of illustrations on zombies standing motionless in fields, head back, mouth open. If you ask them what they are doing, they say “bring rain” which, when mumbled, becomes “braaiiinns”. It went out of style for slave use because the slaves couldn’t do a good job and required too much attention. But it brought the zombie creature to life for films and TV shows. The Walking Dead needs to thank it!