5 Terrifying Drug Crazes (That Were Made Up By The Media)

Vice actually spoke to the woman in the video, who said it had been recorded a year earlier. She heard it was being shared, but didn't think anything of it until everyone she knew started telling her about it and it ended up on TV ... which then got resurrected a year later when the news decided they were short on moral panics. A local channel in Mexico even interviewed someone who claimed to be in the videos, but was in truth just some random stranger who was a solid decade younger than the actual women. But really, who has time to fact-check when OUR CHILDREN are doing THE DRUGS because of SOCIAL MEDIA?

Also, nyaope is a really cheap drug, so there's little reason for anyone to try to save a buck by sharing the high with dirty blood. That's like watching your friend eat a $1 chili cheese burrito and then injecting their blood in the hopes that you both get diarrhea. There's also the fact that it doesn't work at all, which could be a limiting factor.

The people who actually do share blood for highs -- and there are a few who try -- are generally already incarcerated, and thus their access to drugs is pretty limited. Either that or they're so bad off in life that they've reached a point where they think, "I need this guy's rat poison blood mingling with my blood." In other words, if you're a parent and are worried that your kid is doing this, you probably should have started worrying about them long before now.

You'll get about 16,000 results on Google right now if you search for "brieing MDMA," and everything comes back to this one story. No one else is out there shoving disco biscuits into Camembert. Even if this anonymous source was being completely honest and she and the ladies get together to watch Survivor on Wednesday nights and get so goddamn wrecked that they try to fuck the couch cushions every time Jeff Probst says "immunity idol," how is that a "craze," as the URL says, or a "trend," as the article text calls it? If everything one person does in their living room is a craze, then I've been at the center of a whirlwind chicken wing and napping craze for years.

That story cites an anonymous woman who claims to have these parties, and it's written by a writer who routinely gets ripped up for articles that are inaccurate, like this one about deadly spiders, or for taking people's content without credit. Is it possible he just came home and saw his mom and her best friend popping Scooby Snacks during a wine and cheeser? Hey, I wasn't there. It literally could be anything.

March 2018 saw a wasping panic hit places like Indianapolis and Ohio. At the end of 2017, a dude in Tennessee broke into a house, cursed out the dog, cut his own throat, then leapt out a window. He told cops he'd been on Wasp. So you can see why people would want to use it, because that sounds like a party. Sadly, the buzzkills at Snopes were all "Wait, wasp spray? The hell?" and looked into a Daily Mail story that was a big source for the scaremongering around this so-called trend. That story went so far as to say that people high on this stuff were raging like mad dogs and zombies. Raging Mad Dog Zombie is my favorite energy drink, by the way. Tastes like raspberries and uppercuts.

A little digging showed that the The Daily Mail had taken several isolated incidents and conflated them as evidence of a trend, despite all of them not being the same thing. Only one of those stories, the Tennessee guy, was about someone using bug spray. Other ones turned out to be people all whacked out on Spice. That shit's just wonky, and you should not do it or use it to kill wasps.

In 2018, the Winnetka Neighborhood Council in LA issued a warning for parents to be on the lookout for this tasty new brand of meth. They even sourced their concerns with a real article from Fox News. Of course, that article was written in 2007 and just mentions briefly that drug dealers are mixing meth and Kool-Aid to sell to kids. And in 2016, it was terrifying South African parents, but the roots of that scare were also from 2007. There's even info from the Justice Department about law enforcement running across several kinds of flavored meth that year.

But as Snopes pointed out, cops aren't finding flavored meth lying around. Colored meth, sure. We all saw that tasty blue meth on Breaking Bad and wondered if it was blueberry or Cool Glacier. But colored meth is colored as a byproduct of how it's made; it's not an additive. It's not to entice children either, because what goddamn kid has meth money, anyway? When I as a kid, I couldn't afford regular Pop Rocks, let alone the kind that send you to the moon.

I'm no meth expert, because I roll with peyote and fermented milk or I don't roll at all, but I'm also fairly certain that you don't eat meth. You can eat meth, in the sense that you can eat Tide Pods or Olive Garden, but come on. This was a case of mistaken identity over a decade ago, and representatives from the DEA and DrugFree.org have both stated that no one has ever heard of this being real. Strawberry Quik is the Bigfoot of the drug world -- lots of people claim to have been fucked in the forest by it, but they have little evidence to back it up.

Don't do drugs, do watercolors.

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For some real (and terrifying) facts about drugs, check out 6 Frightening New Drugs (You've Never Heard Of) and 5 Drugs That Turn Your World Into A Real-Life Horror Movie.

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