Expert: Ronald Levy, M.D. - 5/20/2010

Question
Is it possible for a healthy, normally sleeping adult, to be placed under the influence of Chloroform or some other sort of anaesthetic agent (e.g. halothane) without their knowledge? This is if applied by cloth, one drop at a time, until desired loss of consciousness is achieved.

I ask because there have been several reports of this taking place over Europe and people being robbed of their personal belongings and other things. So I wanted to know just if there was some agent out there that could work in the way described above and for people to not know that they have been put into a deeper state of sleep.

Answer
It doesn't sound reasonable to me and is probably an urban legend. Generally speaking, Cholorform is very pungent and would likely wake most individuals applied in the method you describe. Halothane would be much harder to manage that way becuase of it's volatility. I would imagine if people were doing this we would hear about several deaths as it would be impossible to control the depth of anesthesia this way and many people would get hypoxic.

Ronald Levy, MD
Professor of Anesthesiology
UTMB-Galveston