Smoke this!

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:09:00 +0000

Forget about huffing gas or chugging cough syrup. This week, Midwestern TV news crews warned viewers about an even cheaper, more nauseating way for kids to get high. "Dirty New Drug Threatens Youth," KIMT-TV in Mason City, Iowa, reported Nov. 2. Three days later, WIFR-TV, in Rockford, Ill., cautioned parents about a "pretty horrific new drug becoming more and more popular in schools across the United States." By yesterday, Austin, Texas, station KXAN was reporting that the city's police department is training officers to deal with the dangerous new drug.

Just how horrific is jenkem, the newest narcotic peril? They say a good dish is only as good as its ingredients and, well, according to a confidential Collier County, Fla., sheriff's office bulletin that somehow made its way to media outlets, jenkem is made up of only two: "fecal matter and urine."

After the right amount of sun-soaked fermentation, a "euphoric high similar to ingesting cocaine but with strong hallucinations of times past" is said to be attainable by huffing the mixture's gaseous byproduct. The bulletin warns that jenkem is now a "popular drug" in American schools, and even included photographic evidence -- several photos of a bottle of milky brown liquid, the spout of which is capped off with a partially inflated balloon, as well as what appeared to be a teenage boy deflating the plastic bladder with an earnest, squinty-eyed puff.

The new American way of death

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:49:00 +0000

Shielded by a January fog, 13-year-old graffiti writer Ari Kraft sneaks through a dilapidated chain-link fence to tag railroad signal boxes. Later that afternoon, the hum of rush-hour conversation aboard the eastbound Long Island Rail Road train to Huntington, N.Y., is pierced by the sound of screeching brakes and an exploding spray paint bottle. Kraft, trying to rush across four sets of tracks to make it to a Sabbath dinner with his mother, only makes it across three.

The next day, as the shock of the tragedy sets in with Kraft's tightknit community in Rego Park, Queens, the teenager's picture appears on a Web site called MyDeathSpace, along with an article about his death and a link to his MySpace page. Kraft's information is featured in a gallery of similar real-world fatalities on MyDeathSpace, which connects its audience not only to news about recent deaths, but to the MySpace pages of the deceased. Just below the cartoonish skull logo and tombstones that are prominently branded on its front page, the site promises "one death or suicide an hour."

Salon.com > Jamie Pietras

Smoke this!

The new American way of death