MONDOmagazine

When the spotted cow rides the white horse

By Jenny Bundock

Hey, America!

I have something I’d like to bring to your attention: I have noticed in the news lately, that your youngsters are addicted to this new drug, and quite frankly, I am APPALLED. I’m sure that it’s been brought to your attention at some point, but your kids are doing “cheese”. Cheese!? Now, I want to know what you are going to do about this, because I’m horrified that anyone thought this was a cool enough name for something made of heroin.

No one — and I don’t care who they are — is cool when they say they are high on cheese. Would Bob Dylan write a song about cheese? Would The Beatles? Or Jefferson Airplane? Hell no. This has cultural and social repercussions beyond our wildest dreams. These fucking uncreative kids and their You Tube-addicted, “someone else will be clever for me” attitudes, taking clips from Sarah Silverman and Lewis Black and usurping their genius for their own “walls” and profile pages. No one taught these kids how to be quick or sharp themselves; they are spending all their time relying on others for wit, and “cheese” is the big, ugly calling card of their generation.

Quite frankly, they should have no excuse. Take Hippies for example. Here you have a group of people who had no jobs, no soap, limited education, communes, guitars, and drug habits that would effectively bulldoze anyone’s brain and they gave us “acid,” which was still pretty clever. “Magic mushrooms”: straight-forward and still amusing; you are intrigued, and you wonder, “what is so magical about them?” Or “Zoomers” which are whimsical and fun all the same.

Other drug classes like Ravers had their respective bouts of creative genius, in “Ecstasy”, then shortened to “E” as well as “G” or “K”; these people found a theme that worked (letters), and they ran with it. Plus, it lends itself to further creative classification like “e-tard”, and “k-hole.”

This is drug codification at it’s finest.

And the final, beat all: Potheads — possibly the dullest and most lethargic of the drug users, and yet, in name a thousand times more creative than these new-school users. Mary Jane, Ganja, Reefer, Pot, Spliff, Joint, grass: the list goes on forever and none of those things are as stupid as “cheese.” No one from this heritage of drug names would have let something like “cheese” happen. (However, through my discussion of this topic with some associates, I discovered that hash was at one point called cheese, but only one person in the group had ever heard of this, so I can only assume that this was not a popular name or that all my friends but one didn’t smoke hash.) Either way, I can see this having a potential drug community-dividing effect — these “cheesers” are going to be cruelly laughed out of rehab a la the scene in Half Baked with Bob Saget.

To make “cheese”, you take heroin and mix it with diphenhydramine, which is what they take out of Benadryl to make things like methamphetamine, because it is an opiate enhancer — and yes, I 100 percent had to look that up. My resume does not include “one summer at a meth lab.” What I don’t understand is, how can you be that clever and scientifically creative and then not follow through with a good name? “Finally, we’ve done it, something new! Now, what to call it…? I know, let’s name it after the general category of dairy products it most closely resembles: cheese!“ Pathetic.

This is yet another great reason why twelve-year olds shouldn’t be doing drugs (among many, for all you people who are up in arms by now about my nonchalant attitude about the state of our youth today). Because of this particular reason, however, I now have to read the word “cheese” about 1000 times on all my news feeds, and hear anchors on CNN, NBC, and the like talk about it and say it too, with that informative news anchor tone: “There’s a new craze that is hitting our school yards called ch-eee-hze and I’m not talking about parmesan. More, at 11.”

Speaking of CNN, let me just talk about my second big-beef with drugs and the media, which these cheese users have brought right back into the limelight: the cost of the aforementioned drugs. While doing research on this stupid name and the substance it represents, I found that one of the news sites had mentioned that the product sold for as little as $2 a hit. Rather than be shocked and alarmed at the cheapness of the drug, I thought to myself, “What? How the hell could any drug be that cheap, what it is made out of? Cheese?” Then I found out that it was supposedly made of Black Tar Heroin, and Tylenol PM.

This quote I found further explains the cheese-making process: ”According to a 14-year old girl being treated at the Phoenix Academy, water is then added to the dry heroin. The watered-down heroin, often called “monkey juice,” is mixed with Tylenol PM tablets. The makers of Cheese heat the mixture to remove excess water, resulting in the final product.”

(Okay, Monkey Juice? That’s 2 for 2 on terrible names if you are keeping score — and both come from the same drug process. Le sigh.)

My question is, HOW could this possibly be $2 a hit? My conclusion is, that it can’t be. I don’t understand why the media insists on making out the drugs in question to be a problem or an attack on our young-people — so cheap you could buy them with your milk money. But when a bust is made, those same drugs become so expensive, no one anywhere ever could have afforded them.

Untrue, but stupidly plausible examples: ”Today a package of heroin worth $9,000 in street value was seized from the pockets of a homeless man on Jarvis street by Toronto police” versus “Today a nine-year-old girl decided not to buy a pack of skittles with the $1.60 she had in her hello kitty change purse and instead bought a rock of crack the size of her fist from a 30-year-old man who was leaning on the fence near her public school at recess.”

Seriously, how can both be true? The easy answer is that neither of them are, and yet, we hear stories like this all the time, so what I can ascertain is that the best thing to happen to the drug market is for the cops to seize a large quantity of it. Though some questions still remain: who is their market analyst on this? Because I hear that drug-users are unreliable. And who are they selling it to for this price? And do they factor into the price, the increase in demand now that they’ve raided a huge percentage of the city’s supply?

The media must seriously count on us all being either too mad or relieved to ask questions when dealing with drug issues. Well, I’m not so easily persuaded.

The added shock-value of CNN’s website and NBC’s articles is that apparently kids as young as ten- and eleven-years old are being admitted into rehab for using cheese. Now, I hate to be a spoilsport here, but if your ten-year-old son is fucked up on smack, and in rehab, that’s not his problem as a kid, or America’s problem as a country — it is your problem as a parent. I mean, your ten-year old is doing heroin. My ten-year-old nephew, he likes playing the Wii. Notice the difference?

Here’s a quick idea: maybe, in an effort to limit his ability to ring up his dealer for a dime at recess, you should not have given him a cellphone and a $20 bill when he left for school that morning. Or maybe when he started rollin’ with Kate Moss and Pete Doherty you might have suspected perhaps something was up? I know hindsight is 20/20.

This all paints the retarded scenario that parents and anchors in the “situation room” drool over, as a further excuse to censor and smother their children. This is a bizarre landscape where your daughter said she was studying at her friend Grace’s house after school, but was actually in a heroin lab with some dealers where they took perfectly good heroin, soaked it, added Tylenol PM, boiled it further to re-dry it, then got meesssseeeeddddd upppp in the crawlspace, and then sold the rest for $2 a hit. Because drug dealers like hanging out with middle-class 14-year olds, tedious production processes, and losing money — that makes sense.

Unfortunately, no one is looking at this from a “does this make sense” perspective; it’s only viewed from a cheese and monkey juice; Mexican heroin drug-lord; “your son may be the next cartel leader, so keep your kids inside where it is safe, and watch CNN so you can keep up with all the potential threats” perspective.

No wonder these kids can’t think of anything better to name their drugs; they haven’t even lived, and we are all paying the non-creative price. I shudder at the thought of how lame our late night TV hosts are going to be when we have to replace people like Stephen Colbert out of this bunch.

God have mercy on us all,
Jenny

P.S. I do not condone the use of heroin, despite its good nicknames, or any other astutely-named drugs.