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

5 No, The Kids Aren't Doing The Cocaine Challenge

Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? That was fun -- all about dumping ice on people to raise awareness of ALS. And the Cinnamon Challenge? That was about kickboxing in a Starbucks bathroom, I think. But did you catch the cocaine challenge? That was made up, but god bless The Mirror, which in 2015 warned us that youths were doing lines of cocaine on social media and then just challenging someone else to do a line of cocaine. The worst part? NONE of the cocaine proceeds were going to charity.

It was apparently a deadly new fad straight from Mexico, the only country on Earth mad enough to invent the taco! We were all doomed! Wealthy young women around the globe were hoovering that schneef, and it was spreading like crabs on your divorced uncle's toilet seat.

Luckily, Vice decided to look into this deadly trend, and they discovered that, shockingly, The Mirror was using a very broad definition of the word "trend." What actually happened was that one woman on vacation in Mexico saw a video of a dude snorting a line as a challenge, and thus did the same thing. She shared the video on WhatsApp, three friends in total made their own videos, and then it ended up being treated like the Invasion of the Powder Snatchers.

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?

4 "Bluetoothing" Is Not A Thing

If you're going to make up a baffling drug trend, then you might as well go balls to the wall and make it sound like a subplot from Blade II. "Bluetoothing" involves something called "nyaope," which is rumored to be a mix of heroin, weed, rat poison, crushed glass, and HIV antiretroviral drugs. Feel free to assume it also contains the ashes of Michael Jackson and canned ham. But that cocktail alone does not a Bluetooth make. See, Bluetoothing entails taking the blood of someone who just injected nyaope and then injecting it into yourself.

The idea is that groups can save money by only having to buy drugs once. Sky News reported on it in May of 2018, and you can trace it all the way back to a story from the beginning of February 2017 on IOL news in South Africa. This initial report seems to have included photos of legit drug users, but just made up a story to go along with it, according to the African health journalism site Bhekisisa.

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.

3 Middle-Aged Women Aren't Stuffing Molly In Cheese And Calling It "Brieing"

You probably paused for a second there because you got confused on how to pronounce "brieing." I don't blame you. It seems like a word that was explicitly designed to give your tongue a panic attack. But the pronunciation doesn't matter. What matters is the dumb thing that it describes: The act of ingesting brie cheese laced with MDMA.

Before you ask "Wait, is this a thing?", the answer is a resounding "Fuck no." The source of this is an an article on Metro, a UK tabloid, which based its entire story around an anonymous woman claiming to have parties with her middle-aged lady friends. Only instead of getting together for tea, they're shoving Molly into soft cheese and then getting fucking ripped like a ticket stub.

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.

2 Addicts Aren't Combining Meth And Wasp Killer

My initial reaction upon hearing of something called "wasping" was to guess that either kids were snorting actual wasps or someone was getting high off of the fumes produced by high-society white ladies. But it's nothing so luxurious as either of those. Wasping is the practice of mixing meth and wasp killer. You know, as one does.

Now, this drug scare seems as real as they can get. ABC News even did a full on story about how people squirt wasp killer into meth, or just bake it and then snort the residue, in order to enjoy effects like a hallucinatory sense of smell. Is that when everyone smells a fart but no one admits to it? I wouldn't know; I live clean.

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.

1 Your Kids Aren't Eating Strawberry Quik Meth

I've had Strawberry Quik once in my life, and that was two times too many. It's Nestle's chocolate syrup, but they decided to eschew chocolate in favor of pink malevolence that dirties the soul. Don't trust it. And don't trust your dealer if he tries to sell you Strawberry Quik meth. Not because Strawberry Quik tastes like the last thing you feel before you die alone, but because it's not a thing.

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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