I’m fascinated by the crazy stuff people will believe about recreational drugs. It never fails to amaze me how credulous some people can be:
“I may have my facts mixed up, but if what I’ve heard is correct, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is actually a term used by junkies to describe a method of shooting up [a] speedball (a mixture of cocaine and heroin) into one’s tear ducts.”
Right. It probably refers to the flashes of light produced by having a huge abscess next to your eyeball. Ouch!
I hope Lindsay was trying to be funny but, over the years, I’ve been told nonsense like this with a straight face. Setting aside the, (speaking of credulous), regular media panics, from banana peel smoking to face eating, what are some of the craziest drug-use rumors you’ve heard from friends and acquaintances?
Shooting drugs into your tear ducts. That’s not the first time I’ve heard it, and I suspect it’s a misunderstanding of applying liquid or powdered drugs to the eye’s mucous membranes which is a disturbing but somewhat effective delivery method. It’s definitely the most painful-sounding.
Most of the other mythological drug stories I’m familiar with are just that various innocuous (or worse, poisonous) compounds will get you high, such as smoking a certain type of moss, or injecting the blood of various animals…
I’ve heard many times as well that LSD permanently lodges in your spine and can cause flashbacks decades later, which was devoutly believed by many people I know and only recently debunked. I’d also heard the same idea that LSD taken once can be passed by the father onto your children decades later and cause them to be born with defects or insane. (To be clear, also NOT true.)
Yes, I’ve also heard it said that methadone accumulates in your bones, clearly a myth.
Also, that junkies shoot-up between their toes. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seems an unlikely (and painful) place to find a good vein.
Another one I’ve heard of is placing a hit of windowpane, (LSD in gelatin sheets, cut into small squares for dosage control), on one’s eyeball. Sounds painful to me, but I can’t imagine using contact lenses, either. I imagine it would work, but since LSD must pass the blood-brain barrier, I don’t know that it speeds things up much, which is the putative reason for doing it. It’s not hard to imagine certain people have tried that one, though.
I believe they are “covering their tracks” literally - hiding the needle marks in a place that isn’t easily detectable in most cases.
Outside of visine/eye medication and sci-fi, I had never heard of the eye being a good way to get drugs into your system. I always imagined tear ducts to be mostly a one-way system by design, so whatever you were putting in there would be shed more than be absorbed - especially since it should be considered an irritant and the first reaction would be to produce tears. Since there are working topical medications for the eye, it would absorb drops in general, but unless targeting the eye why would you bother? Unlike shooting up between the toes, it would probably irritate the eye making a drug problem noticeable and there are probably better capillaries to go after to speed delivery.
Are there any actual/documented recreational drugs that can be used by applying it to the eye? I thought that was a trope, so they didn’t have to have shooting up or snorting for “eeeeevil” drugs on the screen.
The Hurricanes were on our side.