Psychotropics (such as THC), blood-sugar and Amanda Knox’s Nov 5th/6th “questioning"
Until it was recently suggested here, it hadn't occurred to me that AK and RS might - VERY foolishly - have continued getting stoned in the days after the discovery of MK's murder, while they were naively liasing with the cops.
Did you know that when sitting quiescentl the brain can account for an astonishing proportion of the body’s total consumption of oxygen and blood-sugar, which while learning or under the influence of pyschotropics can be as much as c. 40% of its oxygen and c. 80% of blood sugar?
A popular myth used to be that the ascorbic acid (vitamin-C) in orange-juice could help bring a person out of a bad LSD trip. The effect was real - orange juice could function as a paliative - but it was a fallacy that the ascorbic acid acid somehow attenuated the psychotropic effects of lysergic acid.
The explanation for the effect is quite prosaic, and is to do with blood-sugar levels.
The synapses of a person on a psychotropic or hallucinogenic substance are firing like crazy, burning unusually large quantities of blood-sugar and oxygen.
If blood sugar drops far enough it can have the effect of making one feel physically cold and nervous, and a spiral into panic can ensue - more fear, more brain activity, more burning of blood sugar - round and round and round. BUMMER.
Give a person in the grip of this effect anything with readily available sugar in it and the drop in blood-sugar halts or reverses, which breaks the spiral (with any luck).
It applies with cannabis (THC). I've had a few unpleasent experiences myself after imbibing potent stuff, which (I later came to realise) were almost always in the cold, during the British Winter.
If Amanda was still stoned when she entered the 'questura' at c.10.40, hadn't eaten for some time, and was then subjected to intense psychological stress for a couple of hours, it is quite possible she experienced this spiral into hypoglycemia and raw panic.
IOW - after that hour or two of the cops doing their utmost to intimidate her, if not to frighten the **** out of her, late into a chilly November night, with shouted accusations, threats of "30 years in jail" and (IIRC) that she might never see her family again - meaning those of them who mightn't be alive in 30 years, i.e. her parents - she was well and truly FREAKING OUT.
I would guess that the cops are quite familiar with the effect, even if they aren’t aware of the physiological mechanism, and readily incorporate into their techniques for interrogating suspects (but - God forbid -never when “questioning a witness”).
(Yeh, guilters, I know - "there is no evidence that the room in which Amanda was questioned wasn't nice and warm, wasn't lit with soothing ambient lighting and that that she wasn't given a comfy chair and coffee and brioche. Hah! Gotcha!").
Hence, finally, the cops got her signature (along with those of how many of their own? A dozen or more? Talk about protesting too much) to the bizarre "statement" or "confession" or "accusation" (whatever the **** it's supposed to be) that they had typed up, and then they gave her the (in)famous "brioche and coffee" (by which time it was, literally, the middle of the night).
After this her blood-sugar normalised and she regained some sense of calm, then composing the 5.45 AM "gift" (something she DID actually write herself) in which she tried to describe the "unreality" of what she had just experienced.
Closing - if AK and RS were indeed getting stoned in the days after the murder, perhaps this is a large part of the reason why, to the the cops, "the American's" behaviour was perceived as "strange" - not that this would constitue the SLIGHTEST mitigation for what the bastards subsequently infllicted on the two of them (and Lumumba).
