Florida sheriff spreads BS about fake drug made from human waste

The Smoking Gun reports that the sheriff's intelligence bureau in in Collier County, Florida issued a warning to be on the lookout for a dangerous recreational drug called "jenkem," made from fermented human waste.

A quick search on the rumor busting site Snopes.com would have saved the bureau from embarrassment.

From Smoking Gun:

It's an inhalant called "Jenkem," and causes hallucinations and a "euphoric high." Of course, as the bulletin notes, Jenkem users dislike its sewagey taste, which can last for days. That's because Jenkem's active ingredients are urine and fecal matter, hence its street names like "Butthash" and "Fruit from Crack Pipe."

Link (Thanks, Larry!)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

I’m with Brett Burton: if it were possible to get high off fermented human wastes, humans would know all about it.
tazzy531

Maybe this is what the “2 Girls, 1 Cup” girls were trying to do.

I can’t wait until another sheriff bulletin about that video.
fathercrow

Simon:

If you read the article, you will find direct quotes from individuals who use Jenkem, and also from Educational Specialists, and members of the Lusaka DEA.

The article was written by Ishbel Matheson the BBC correspondent in Lusaka.

So it looks like they didn’t get all their info from Wikipedia.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow
RaptorOne

I agree that is could very well be real, Snopes doesn’t call it an urban legend or a hoax, just that it’s status is “Undetermined”. So I don’t think you can accurately call it “BS” just yet…
Ex-Fed

I love the sourcing: an email from a parent who heard it from a guy who heard it at school.

I also love some of the details in the press release. One street name for the drug: “Leroy Jenkems.” (Presumably the kid told his dad it was actually Leeeeeeeeroy Jenkems!!!!!” but that didn’t translate.) Also, the bit about seeing dead people.

Really, how hard would it be to hire one disaffected 15-year-old as a youth culture consultant?
mrfitz

Yeah, I did some jenkem a while back. It’s not so bad once you get past the corn and peanuts.
ill lich

People are talking so much shit here, it’s making me high!

#33– good point, a friend of mine once sold fake cocaine to a classmate who LOVED it (he was trying to get the dude to leave him alone, it backfired, he wanted MORE of what my buddy mixed up in his mom’s kitchen).

Most world cities are built over miles of fermenting sewage– how come this is the first we’ve heard of getting high from the fumes? Hmmm. . .maybe this is how the first reports of giant alligators appeared, or even CHUDs: the “witnesses” were all high!
saehn

The article lists the consumption process as: sealing the the excrement, waiting for methane to form, and then inhaling the methane.

However, methane does not have the described effects:

http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/chemicals/chem_profiles/methane/health_met.html
Patrick Austin

Damn, I was _so_ looking forward to congress passing legislation dictating minimum sentencing guidelines for people who fail to flush their toilets. 10 year minimum sentence. 20 years if the crime occurs within 1/4 mile of a school.
abb3w

Sounds similar to Jet from Fallout 2.
Mecharius

Comedy Gold: ABC 33/40 out of Birmingham, Alabama just ran the jenkem story in the evening news as serious business.

However, living in Birmingham, this makes me a sad panda.
Diatryma

I tried to post this earlier, but failed. Alas!

What interests me is what the active compound could be– not methane, because if methane were hallucinogenic on this level, people would use gas stoves. I would not at this point rule out that something interesting could potentially happen in wastewater; caffeine and other recreational drugs are used as markers in many cities. You can estimate the number of people over time according to the anthropogenic chemicals in the wastewater. I don’t think anything ferments to something interesting, not under the conditions we use to treat wastewater, but given the variety of chemicals present in there to begin with, who knows what could happen.
Pure speculation, of course. And here’s more: might the hallucinogenic effects be due to something non-biological in the wastewater? Industrial contaminants fermenting in light and/or anaerobic conditions to produce gaseous compounds?
glace neuf

a kid i knew from OK told me that some of his buddies would boil cow dung to get high off the methane. not sure if that was true or not, but maybe this is a similar thing?
mikelotus

remember in the movie Up and Smoke and from the original Cheech and Chong albums. “this is good shit man, what is it?” “Labrador” “Labrador?, what’s that?” “My Labrador ate my stash and I followed him around for days waiting for it to come out.” “You mean we are smoking dog shit man?”
mikelotus

i just stick my head down into the toliet after a foul one. the hallucinations are great. i saw god one time and jimi hendrix another time.
braschlosan

Jenkem is old news. Its been around for many years. Its use in Africa is well documented. BoingBoing needs to retract the headline of this article.
fontgoddess

If your neighborhood is so bad the kids are huffing sewage for escapist relief, “drug use” is not your primary problem.

WB2 news in Denver ran a jenkem story this evening. Not like I thought they had higher standards, but still . . .
mikelotus

i remember the first time we tried jenkem. we were amazed at its toxicity. the effects were so astounding, that i found myself riding my bike through the streets of Basel at night. when i got home, my wife looked like a witch.
daha

But snopes does NOT bust the rumor. They were unable to determine if it was true or false, but they did find references going back to 1995.

It sure sounds like the sort of thing you’d make up to try and fool gullible stoners into sucking in shit-stink, but at this point there are just suspicions of a hoax, not a conclusion.
misscatofmontrealfame

I first read about this story a day earlier on PEREZ HILTON!
http://perezhilton.com/?p=8364
what is going on?
acb

I once heard a rumour about some hardcore potheads, who had developed a tolerance to the effects of cannabis, spiking their joints with horse manure for an extra buzz. Perhaps that’s where the term “shithead” came from?
Flying Squid

If nothing else, it restricts the flow of oxygen to the brain which can produce euphoria and hallucinations…
ill lich

As much as the story sounds like BS, and as much as Sheriffs Departments of the US are known for getting things wrong in the paranoia of drug fears (remember “Mickey Mouse acid”?), there could very well be some truth to it. The idea that it’s actually just starving the brain of oxygen is a possibility. What we need now is a test toke– who’s up for it?
Moliticon

I agree with FontGoddess. How boring does a place have to be?

The local sheriff informed the school system to be alert for Jenkem usage. Apparently this news has circulated inside law enforcement.

I suspect the drug dog will be particularly adept at squashing this threat.
mikelotus

you people really need to get your shit together
Technical Writing Geek

Actually, Jenkem is real. The BBC reported on it, but only in Africa. The Sheriff’s department has been spending too much time reading the internet, and the editors here need to read more carefully, as there’s no indication Jenkem is smoked, only inhaled.

The whole thing makes me wanna barf, as does the thought of more of my tax dollars going to save idiots from themselves. Stop drug enforcement now.
rednikki

The sheriff department got its info from the Encyclopedia Dramatica – and there is some question about whether the BBC info is actually true (it basically all traces back to “well, one guy said people were huffing human waste in Africa…”)
More info here:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_jenkem.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,308841,00.html
Linking to Fox makes me feel kinda dirty, but sometimes it has to be done.
Cowicide

What? No props to the originators of the hoax?

This hoax was started about a month or two ago by 420chan.org within its now defunct invasion chan (I guess they moved it to IRC or whatever because of the heat coming down on them). Posing as concerned parents, etc. they “notified” school principles, etc. of the “Jenkem problem” and I assume it “trickled” its way to the sheriff eventually.

And, yes, the channers knew it was already a real problem in Africa, but with no known cases in the U.S.

They got LAWLS, I suppose.
deejayqueue

Here’s a link to a short story that I saw referenced on Wil Wheaton’s blog.

http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/123187.html

and a quote from it:

“I dipped the old jar down into the creeping slurry and scooped a pint of shit-water out of the Thames, down where the sewers meet the river. It’s come to this, I said to no-one: making jenkem rather than seeing the Jack Baby.

Seal up the jar, watch it ferment for long sleepless days, and then inhale the gas off the top. Jenkem: ghetto drugs. An hour of laying like a corpse and seeing dead things instead of the orgasm-jerking and spacewalk day of a Jack high. But I couldn’t afford Jack, and I didn’t want to think about the Jack Baby.”

Sound familiar?
Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Dried dung of all kinds is used as fuel in many parts of the world. No one gets high off the smoke.

Methane doesn’t have the reported effects. Neither does oxygen deprivation.

Here’s how it really works:

You can talk yourself into thinking you’re high, if you work at it hard enough. When you tell your friends about it afterward, you’ll make it sound like you got even higher.

So now there’s this story that kids tell kids tell kids, one of whom eventually tells a teacher or counselor or parent about what this friend of a friend did. The teacher or counselor reports it as sober fact. Local law enforcement announces that they have a problem. The news networks pick it up and report that so-and-so says there’s a problem. And so forth.

Doesn’t anyone remember the hoax reports about how you could get high by smoking banana peels?
komies

There was a discussion on SomethingAwful’s TCC forum a while back. There were references to this page:

http://www.totse.com/community/showthread.php?t=2013870

It’s no longer available, but before it was removed I read it. jenkem tried by some 13 year old kid, and apparently he did experience some of the purported results.
Brett Burton

According to the wikipedia entry for Jenkem, the kid with the live journal page admitted to faking the whole thing. He apparently said the Jenkem “was faked using flour, water, beer and Nutella.” I’m pretty sure if fermented poop gas could get you high and make you hallucinate for days, we would have heard about it before 2007.
fathercrow

Hey:

Well, the BBC seem to think it exists as they have an article, and quotes from Jenkem users.

So its snopes vs the BBC

I vote for the Beeb.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/406067.stm

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow
ill lich

The funny thing, the clearly ironic thing, is that (true or not) this Sheriff has done more to publicize this new “drug” and thus convince kids to try it. My first though upon hearing of this (before boingboing picked up on it) was that it was some kind of trick to fool kids into getting sick while experimenting with drugs: “THAT’LL teach em!”

(When I was a kid I tried a cigarette and got so sick that I never smoked again, of course I’m sure many more kids got hooked).
Simon Greenwood

It’s on Encyclopedia Dramatica too, has been for several months, so I call lulz.

@FatherCrow: the BBC are as guilty as the rest of us in looking up information on Wikipedia and passing it on as news, so take what they say with a pinch of, well, something.