I was having brunch yesterday when conversation veered (too quickly for my taste) from Thanksgiving plans to smoking feces, the new drug made popular by bored teens in the midwest. Umm, how did I miss this?

Across the country last week, local stations aired stories about a sharp increase in the use of jenkem, a fermented mixture of urine and feces inhaled to achieve a high akin to cocaine, accompanied by hallucinations. Suddenly, jenkem was the new meth and I was talking about it at brunch, on my birthday.

According to this Salon article, the hysteria was fabricated, kids in the heartland are still just stealing cough syrup and fertilizer to get high. The drug, though, is real and was first made by impoverished kids in Zambia.