CHANDIGARH: Search ‘venom’ on the internet and it says that “the amount of neurotoxin that a king cobra can emit in one bite is enough to kill 20 people — or one elephant”. Two men from Rajasthan have been getting cobras to bite them on their tongues as no amount of the usual narcotic substances gives them a high anymore. Now they are a subject of research at Chandigarh’s Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research.Scientists at the hospital’s deaddiction centre are baffled. The case history of the duo has just been published in the ‘Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine’. The study, ‘ Snake venom use as a substitute for opioids: A case report and review of literature’, was done by doctors Aseem Mehra, Debashish Basu and Sandeep Grover.“The study was undertaken to make clinicians aware about such substance abuse for recreational purposes as not much medical literature is available,” said Grover. The patients were from Rajasthan and had been opioid-dependent for more than 15 years.Only four reports of use of snake venom for recreational purposes have been published so far from India. These (two) users were from well-off families.