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Opiates and Pangolin Scales is Rumor Debunked | National Geographic


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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[Rachel] Pangolins are a really unique group of mammals. They are covered with these scales that are made of keratin, which is the same material as human finger nails. And it's those scales that are in high demand, and it's driving a lot of illegal trade that we see.

[Ken] Here at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory, we're very much like a police crime lab, in that we examine evidence in a triangular fashion. We attempt to link suspect, victim, and crime lab together with that evidence. We assist investigators at the state, national, and international level to investigate violators of wildlife laws. We're the only such full service wildlife crime lab in the world.

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We're very much aware that the pangolins have been killed for a wide range of reasons. These little creatures have a hard time protecting themselves; their defense is to roll up into a ball. Which makes them easy for the poachers to collect.

[Rachel] Pangolin scales have been used in traditional medicines in different parts of the world for a long time, but it's just now that it's on this, kinda, larger commercial scale. That's where we see this species being threatened.

[Ken] But then we became aware of this interesting story that you could grind up a pangolin scale and exarate chemicals out of there to make illicit drugs.

So there's this rumor that on my news resources that pangolin scales contained tramadol. Tramadol is a synthetic analgesic, so it's used to treat pain. It's not known to be synthesized in any natural system. And then there was, on top of this, even some suggestion that the trade in pangolins was driven in part by this demand for tramadol, which was then being used for the manufacture of methamphetamine.

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We weren't really sure to what extent this kinda rumor was actually driving the trade, but it was something we could actually address with the data that we had and actually look for it.

[Ken] We were asked to identify pangolin scales early on, simply because they were being seized as evidence.

[Rachel] We actually probed the sample for tramadol, and we did that for 104 scales, representing 104 different individuals of all species. All right, so what we do is just go in and try and find a spot that minimally invasive, that people aren't gonna notice too much. A little end of it here, and we don't need very much. So the dart can obtain profiles from really small pieces of material.

So the dart is getting the full chemical profile of that keratin. It gives us, in a bit, the entire spectrum of what's in there, and we can probe that chemical profile to look for tramadol specifically. And that's what we did.

It's telling you the size and the intensity of the ions that are actually in the sample.

[Rachel] I came to this lab because I wanted to do something that I thought could make a difference. We're just doing our small part to help reduce illegal wildlife trade. We looked at all species and we didn't find any evidence for tramadol within our detection window. So, we're confident that we didn't find tramadol. (laughs) That's what it is, yeah.

We've worked a lot of the interesting cases in which we examined evidence on rhino horn pills, rhino horns themselves, sea turtle meat, or sea turtle leather in the glass eels, wide range of wildlife parts and products. But I think the pangolin scales offered us something a little different. I'm happy to think that our work is gonna help stop the killing of these poor creatures for a myth, for a story that simply isn't true. If that's the case, we'll be happy indeed.

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