I remember all the little "coffee stirrers" with the comically tiny spoon like ends. Of course the explanation was it's for stirring your coffee or adding a little sugar. Though who adds a tiny bump of sugar to their coffee? Turns out it was for coke and they were commonly available everywhere. The McDonalds ones were semi famous for that.
Its similar to those little fake flowers in a glass tube on counters in corner stores which make great crack pipes (same with those short cheap tire pressure gauges). Or the cheap looking socks they oddly sell which are useful for tie off before shooting heroin.
Oh funny, I wondered why they had so many of these at the gas station by the checkout. I bought one and it was terrible for telling my tire pressure. I could not understand why so many people wanted to measure their tire pressure.
Many, many years ago, naive me bought my girlfriend one of those roses at a 7-Eleven, and I still remember her response: "Oh, Honey, you bought me a craaack pipe!" We're not together anymore.
Plenty of people, including me, fill tires with free air at gas stations which gets them in the door. It's not surprising that cheap tire pressure gauges would be sold near the checkout, unrelated to drug use.
They'll surely all allow some kind of measurement, otherwise someone will overfill their tyre, burst it, and then sue for the fact the explosion has left them with brain damage.
If you do your own compounding of supplement powders, nootropics, etc. into gelcaps, you probably own one of these.
Bonus fact: there's a brand of lab scoops with a very fun name — the scoopula (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoopula). It's so fun to say that that's just what many people call lab scoops, not realizing it's a brand.
The glass rose is definitely for smoking crack. Else why is it ofen sold as a combo with a peice of (also-required) chore-boy. 5 bucks for both. Usually on the same shelf with the round-ended meth pipes which dont seem to require any cover but being called "oil burner"
The others were listed in a similar article. The small tire pressure gauge was told to me by a friend who at one point had a crack habit and used said items to smoke crack and said it was a well known item to use for such a purpose.
Your original comment makes it sound like the main purpose of the small spoon is for cocaine - "Turns out it was for coke". But it's not "for coke", it's for stirring your coffee, and it's just that cocaine users found an alternative use for it. The article makes this pretty clear.
Okay, you convinced me about that one (I haven't heard about this love rose thing before, and I don't live in the US). But my point about the stirrers still stands.
I also think that the cheap socks are just that. But maybe they're popular due to their additional unintended use.
The size of the clientele for many of these things probably would have been much smaller without the illicit uses, and they probably were created without illicit motives. Once there is demand, however, the further use was probably quantifiable as legit vs. off-brand use and even if one maker of glass tubes (for e.g.) stops because they're useful as rock pipes of some kind, someone else would be happy to pick up the slack.
thanks for the link. I have seen full sized roses in plastic tubes at gas stations and I was trying to figure out how those could be used for drugs. These little ones make more sense.
I think I was 15 when I called bullshit on that coffee spoon. I didn't understand what was going on exactly, but part of me knew that was a stupid size for coffee. I may have even joked about it being for cocaine, but I don't think I was serious about that. Nobody where I lived used cocaine, right?
That ugly disposable McDonald's branded spoon doesn't strike me as something that 70s-80s era women would view as being "cool" or "hip". I really doubt a guy like Burt Reynolds would spend a few grand on a small amount of blow and then cheap out on the spoon.
That link actually throughly refutes what the OP claimed.
They claimed that drug paraphernalia was being sold as "coffee stirrers" (wink, wink) that nobody would actually use for coffee.
That link says people were using actual coffee stirrers to also snort cocaine. Their original intended use was as coffee stirrers, not drug paraphernalia.
Indeed, and for all the people scoffing at how they can't possibly be coffee stirrers, most coffee shops nowadays give you tiny plastic or wooden twigs, which are far less effective at actually stirring, and yet still get the job done ok.
A small spoon at the end of a modern stirrer would be much more effective, yet I guess people would accuse them of selling drug paraphernalia.
No, there's an absurdly minor difference. Plenty of "coffee stirrers" were intentionally manufactured as coke spoons, and plenty of earnest coffee stirrers were used instead as coke spoons.
McDonald's was obviously not intentionally trying to manufacture coke spooks for absolutely no conceivable gain, but I bet their packaging designers looked at a lot of random coffee stirrers and tried to make one that looked like the fanciest of those.
Worked 3rd shift for a gas station for a year and a half. Seedy elements would come in and ask for the glass roses regularly, but we didn't sell them because they were known paraphernalia.
The socks are for huffing paint/other solvents. Most junkies won't even need to tie off, and if they do they'll buy the shoelaces that are sold right next to the socks!
yeah a lot of people are dying right now from fentanyl polluted cocaine, and it is fairly obvious from the reports but every thread goes the same way:
"its so insensitive to suggest this person I respected did drugs, how dare you!"
++20 comments of arguing
<toxicology article comes out>: It was fentanyl in their cocaine.
until this aspect of supply chain control gets taken seriously by the government without worrying about acknowledgment equalling condoning, the ignorance is going to keep perpetuating because the education was done so poorly. abstinence-only education doesn't work.
Saw that there is fentanyl laced pot in US states now, especially in Connecticut which is very surprising as Connecticut is a legal state. Articles were all light on details so I wonder where the marijuana is purchased from. I would be surprised if it was a dispensary. If not a dispensary though, why are people buying pot from street level dealers when anyone can just walk into a dispensary and buy lab tested legal marijuana?
> If not a dispensary though, why are people buying pot from street level dealers when anyone can just walk into a dispensary and buy lab tested legal marijuana?
Many frameworks are doing heavy ID data collection in the stores, instead of just glancing at your ID. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, whether it is an anti-establishment user avoiding the government their whole life, to school teachers or religious leaders, or one of the 20 million Americans working for the federal government let alone someone with a clearance or a federal contract.
Secondly, the cost and punitive taxes are high to many people.
Exactly. Many people are one regulatory change away from alot of problems. Another potential issue is insurance - if your life insurer obtains records that you’re buying marijuana, your family may see their insurance claim challenged if you carry a non-smoker policy.
“Background Checks” are the magical non-solution for many problems. Between work, church activities and youth sports, I probably have 6-8 entities running background checks of varying levels of intrusiveness on me annually. I’m sure that information is shared with all sorts of third parties.
Seems like the cure for all of this is for politicians to get around to making it federally legal. That would involve going against their lobbyists / donors so not sure its going to happen any time soon. Would be pleasantly surprised if it did though.
DanceSafe, a harm reduction focused non-profit, had this to say regarding the recent news about it:
"We've gotten a lot of inquiries about the recent Connecticut statement confirming the presence of #fentanyl in a lab-tested cannabis sample. This article breaks this down in a way that we align with, but we have some additional comments.
Regarding the issue of this lab report as a whole:
1. It is unclear why the lab report designates that the sample contained delta-9 THC, marijuana, and fentanyl. We are confused by the separate designation of delta-9 THC and marijuana, since THC is a component of marijuana (along with over 100 other cannabinoids). We will be contacting the lab to inquire further.
2. As elucidated in this article, the circumstances around this test are unclear and we are missing additional information. We are tentatively agreeing that this appears to be a confirmed report of fentanyl in cannabis, but we do not believe that this represents any sort of market trend at this time, and more information is required to determine how and why this might have happened.
Regarding this article, we have some disclaimers about language/content that we disagree with:
1. It is technically possible to "smoke" fentanyl. Fentanyl can be burned and destroyed in direct contact with flame, but it is feasible for fentanyl to be close enough to a flame to vaporize.
2. We're not happy about the choice to say "All it takes is one idiot who thinks it's a good idea to mix fentanyl in marijuana and we can have a cluster of overdoses." People have been speedballing all kinds of drugs for ages. This can be a risky behavior, but we still do not condone calling people idiots - especially when drug education has been made intentionally inaccessible and healthcare is prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire.
Additional general notes:
1. If someone wanted to intentionally mix fentanyl into their weed, they'd most likely dissolve it in alcohol and spray it on, not just crumble a tiny and possibly lethal dose of it on top of a random part of a nug.
2. You cannot use fentanyl test strips on cannabis (or any other organic material). We are not concerned about fentanyl in cannabis at this time.
3. The risk of cannabis being contaminated with fentanyl remains astronomically low, if it exists at all. Until additional information arises, we can assume that there was indeed fentanyl present in this cannabis. For now, we don't know anything about the how or why.
4. Strong, harsh taste when smoking illicit market cannabis is most likely an indicator that you have picked up synthetic cannabis of some sort. Synthetic cannabinoids are sprayed onto potpourri and other plant matter. It is very unlikely that you would have smoked anything sprayed with PCP (which is virtually nonexistent in the U.S.), and nearly statistically impossible that you would be smoking something containing fentanyl."
Because people actually want to buy fentanyl laced products. I've known people addicted to stimulants that they buy knowing that they are cut with fentanyl just to get that combination with the opioid high.
Do you think that's the case for cocaine? Personally, I have a hard time believing that because of both the type of high cocaine is for and because that seems like a worst case for a mix since mixing fentanyl in a powder seems like it would be error prone to me, but I can't deny that people do crazy shit.
I feel like this is a parable for A/B testing without considering the consequences.
For McDonald's, straws and stirrers are provided gratis, so you aren't succeeding if you raise demand for the stirrer. If a stirrer sold you more coffee, then it was a success. Just like the thicker straw sold more shakes (some of their competitors never figured that out, and one wonders if they ever actually talked to a customer or just sat in smoky meeting rooms bullshitting all day).
However coffee being a stimulant, there is probably some overlap between the two demographics. It'd be hard to track if a lot of stirrers left with a coffee drinker but were unused for coffee. So perhaps in fact they did sell extra coffee to cocaine users and just patted themselves on the back for the increased revenue.
Except that it heavily contributes to supporting foolish policies and the bliss quickly wears off and requires ever increasing amount of ignorance to achieve the same bliss … see today's policies for reference.
I.e. ignorance of the drug underworld vs social ignorance of policy makers
To get "true" knowledge (lack of ignorance) on the suffering of drug abuse, one must experience it in some way, so avoiding this experience is the "ignorance" that leads to the "bliss"
Or at least that is my interpretation of the saying :)
Its similar to those little fake flowers in a glass tube on counters in corner stores which make great crack pipes (same with those short cheap tire pressure gauges). Or the cheap looking socks they oddly sell which are useful for tie off before shooting heroin.