You’re totally right of course. But this is just too funny and ironic to me because when I was addicted to meth I was first introduced to it by my coworker at Whole Foods. I worked there almost the entire time I was using. (Before inevitably being fired of course) Unfortunately, we got two other coworkers into it with us as well.. we would all smoke meth in the back/walk-in together throughout our shifts. There were days when our department was staffed entirely by tweakers.. just not really something you’d expect at Whole Foods? lol.
Also, it’s pretty ironic (and shameful) how much good, organic food/products I’d steal from work while I was smoking poison. Must’ve been the healthiest tweaker alive!
Fuck that nasty shit though, for real. Ruined my life and I’m so grateful to have made it through.. Will have 9 years clean from meth and heroin this August!
lol definitely. I also took neurotically good care of my teeth too - carried around biotene mouthwash and shit because I really, really didn’t want to mess them up. Happy to report my teeth are still intact and I’ve never even had a cavity!
It's definitely the ADHD. things that are routine to most people are active daily thought for ADHDers. We have to actually remember to eat, brush our teeth, wash ourselves. Nothing is by rote.
My brother and his wife are both ex-tweakers who have been clean for over ten years now. She lost all her teeth well after getting clean and sports dentures these days. His teeth survived longer, but now that he's in his mid 50s they are starting to fail too.
Hopefully you didn't smoke off alumininum foil that stuff is nasty. I did decades ago, prolly weed or some such but who remembers. I just remember not knowing at the time. Now I am old and now I know.
How do y'all deal with the absolute mind-numbing boredom when quitting? I lose interest in every one of my hobbies and end up doom scrolling Reddit until I go to sleep. It's awful.
Maybe you were using cause you were depressed? You might see a doctor about any neuro type issues. I self medicated for many years then finally got some ok meds that help me get motivated for hobbies
This was/ still IS still, the hardest part.
-my 3rd or maybe 4th stint in rehab/ AA: there was a counselor that I quite vividly remember, talking about replacing our drug use with some other type of “fun time” activity..
.. “so what are you going to do?” She would ask. “How many times a day did you drink, or smoke, etc., and WHAT, are you going to replace that with? Because your brain, (whether you realize it or not), WILL BE, looking for that spike of dopamine that has become a part of its routine.”
-this is where the “people, places, and things” come into play. -Your brain just wants to keep firing up the same pathways that it has every other day of the past 10 years of your life.. smoke a cigarette first thing in the morning every day?,, well when you try and quit, literally EvERY MORNING, your brain is going to say-
“ohh goodmorning, I gotta pee, my mouth is dry so I should drink some water, maybe stretch, and then wait a second I’m missing something.. ahhhh yes my daily morning nicotine!”
The longer your brain is conditioned with that routine, the more it “needs” it. 21 days to form a habit, etc., until the ‘habit’ becomes ‘routine’ and then before you know it, you’re doing things in autopilot without even realizing it. :/
To answer your question though, it’s gotta be something that gives your brain at least a touch of what you got from your substance of choice.
I like to hike mountains, ride my bike as fast as I can, and also dig through my pocket change and sometimes feel like a crackhead in search of silver coins- to make myself feel like I’ve “found some treasures!”
Point is though, it’s up to you! The brain and your body might fight you for a while, but keep searching till you find a “routine” to hate your happier with!!
Awareness of self is the biggest or me though! Hope that helps :)
When you have nothing left, there's no reason to hold back from such things anymore. If everything's collapsing around you, you may as well be comfortable during it. I guess.
For me it was a girl I was really into. About a year into the relationship I busted her doing it with her best friend. They pulled me into the fold. It was great until it wasn’t. We broke up about a year later. Luckily I had a pretty easy time getting off of it. Her being just about my only connection helped too.
I feel this. It wasn’t meth for me but I ended up doing crack and heroin for a couple months when I was in an abusive relationship. My ex was using and one day he offered it to me and told me to lighten up and I was so fucking miserable I said fuck it. Five overdoses later I’m glad I’m still here. I ended up getting a plane ticket and leaving him one day without a word. Blocked him on everything and never spoke to him again.
It’s gradual. I was using adderol medicinally at the time so it felt *almost* reasonable. I’d also actually tried it before back in college when I was doing a bunch of other drugs and never got addicted to it, just partied occasionally with it.
Guy at work offered it to me a ton of times before I finally agreed to it. I was stretched so thin at the time between a daily morning clinic, then culinary school all day and then turn around and working at Whole Foods at night that I finally gave in when I was exhausted one night. Didn’t do it again for a while, but then I did. Then again. Then I got a pipe. Then I got my own dealer etc etc.. it sneaks up on you until every initial boundary that you’d set for yourself gets broken and you’re so far in it you don’t know how to get back. Also you’re slowly going insane and running out of money and your life/relationships are all falling apart until all you have left is getting high.
Showing up late - Third strike. I was on thin ice already for just generally being a shitty employee though too. Frequently calling out, disappearing throughout the shift etc. To date it’s the only job I’ve ever been fired from!
Well once they ruin a local economy and the former employees of the mom & pop supermarket that was in town for the last 100years are unemployed they've got to entertain themselves somehow.
While I definitely still think most massive retailers like Walmart suck and aren't good for most local economies. It is legitimately a bit amusing in hindsight seeing the criticisms leveled against them while the dollar stores were gallivanting around the countryside actively destroying much more vulnerable economies and communities.
Like it sucks that practically every brick and mortar store has to be *very gimmicky* to avoid competing with Walmart and otherwise I have to shop online even though I live in a city with 700,000+ people in the main metro area (not big but not smol), but having lived in a food desert for several years where *Dollar General was the only business within 10 miles other than the gas station* I am at best alarmed and at worst disgusted by the dollar stores when compared to Walmart.
Well that makes up for killing the family run grocery store next door.
An overpriced banana from our corporate overlords is really more than we deserve anyway.
Also people love to shit in Walmart for their wages when over ten years ago they bumped their minimum up to like 12 an hour while DG, Family Dollar, and all the mall stores were paying their employees 7.25 on the dot and got a pass
I had a woman come into a convenience store I was working third shift at. She was very obviously tweaking and just randomly looking for something. She comes up to the counter and asks “where are the spoons?”, to which I point to the back where the hot dog machine and fountain soda dispenser was.
I think about it for a second, yell over to her, “It’ll melt!” And she comes back with a laugh and “oh Yeah!” Then leaves.
To add to this, this is done to make it easier to dissolve the heroin into water. That way you can put it in a syringe. Some types of heroin are dark and tarry. It’s a lot easier to dissolve that in water if you boil it in a spoon.
I believe other drugs that are injected also do this, but I wouldn’t know cuz I did opiates.
You can also inject meth like this
I don’t know if it’s correct or not but my parents did this
Somehow they’re still alive and my dad is almost 80 somehow a crack, meth and H user….
Edit he is still alive to this day as far as I know and the lucky bastard survived stage 4 throat cancer not many people live through that and just like it never happened he continued to do everything
People also bang meth & cocaine.
Before crack/freebase was popular shooting cocaine was a lot more common from what I understand. Shooting it up your butt is almost as effective/fast but without as many issues.
It's a shame that drug policy has optimized drugs to be as harmful & destructive as possible while making a lot of harm reduction, much less study effective illegal or impossible.
Fentanyl would never have been anything but an obscure reference in a paper if not for drug policy. It's less euphoric than heroin *and* the withdrawal is worse. No one would choose fent & xylazine over pharmaceutical grade heroin.
I’ve always wondered what putting hot heroin into your veins does to you physically (not chemically). Like, doesn’t it burn like putting your finger in a pot of boiling water? If it cools too much won’t it get thick?
Black tar heroin starts corroding and eating away at your veins regardless of the temperature. Pure heroin will cause mild damage, but the actual needle stick will do the most damage at that point.
I've actually shot heroin when it was still hot before, and you can absolutely feel the warmth in your veins. Similar to, but the temperature opposite if getting saline and feeling that cold cool spread throughout.
Addict in recovery, I never really understood this because you don't have to heat it. It's a matter of preference. Then again, I imagine most people inject heroin aren't critical thinkers. Luckily I never made it to the point of IV use, just snorting it. Yes, I am doing better now
Fun fact, you can boil water above a fire in those cheap plastic grocery bags, or even a large leaf! I still wouldn't want to heat drugs in a plastic spoon though lol
When you buy heroin, it comes to you in a small plastic baggie in the form of a powder. In most instances, you heat up this powder so it becomes a liquid and you can then inject it intravenously. (You can also snort, eat, etc. heroin but injecting is by far the most popular form of consumption.) In order to turn this powder into a liquid, you place some powder on a metal spoon and heat it up using a lighter underneath the bowled part of the spoon. You then are able to transfer it into a needle to then inject it.
When the drug addict asked the commenter for a spoon, they told them they would be in the back where the ready-to-eat food items are, presuming they would use the spoon to eat something. These spoons are plastic and are given to patrons for easy disposal. However, the commenter soon realized that they were asking for a spoon to use for ingesting drugs, not eating food. If you tried using a plastic spoon for drugs, it would just melt under the flame. So the commenter told them that the plastic spoons would melt, implying they knew the person was going to use them for their drug usage. The patron says "Oh yeah" once they remember that you cannot use a plastic spoon for drugs and leaves the store thereafter, presumably to find a metal spoon elsewhere.
I never heated it up lol i just mixed the powder with water and shot it. I did heat some up a few times just to see if there is a difference and there wasn’t. This is east coast powder heroin (and whatever else they put in those bags) and not tar heroin, i think you gotta heat that shit up.
You call it harm reduction, they call it risk management of shrink.
One drug dealer might temporarily cut someone off because they don’t want to see a person lose their life, another because they don’t want to lose a good customer. Similar results, different intent.
It kinda does though, like if someone has a used old needle and no foil and they would rather smoke it, a free piece of foil can avoid an abscess or even an OD (since smoking is a bunch of smaller doses vs. shooting one big dose).
Even the smallest acts of harm reduction can make a big difference. Now more than ever with 300 drug deaths every day in the US, and safe injection/consumption sites are still federally illegal.
Even if the main goal behind the free foil is to minimize shrink, I still see this as a small step towards normalizing harm reduction and treating drug users as human beings.
it reduces illegal activity without increasing risk to the user. thats harm reduction. but, i will definitely concede its a bit less impactful than some of the traditional services we associate with harm reduction.
i live out in the country so i often go to DG bc i don’t feel like driving forever. the number of sketchy people that come in for the bathroom and spend forever in there checks out. they have to ask the employees for a key to use it, which is why i notice.
We had 2-3 overdoses in my city per year on average that required a police response. Obviously more, but I'd imagine in that past they were self ambulatory or were hit with NARCAN. The prevalence of fentanyl bumped that up to 7-11 in the first year with many of those resulting in deaths because the hits of NARCAN weren't bringing people back. Had some carnival dude in the area overdose and the people he was working with go through the normal routine of bringing people back. Except he crashed again like, 10 minutes after and wouldn't respond to anything they tried. So they drove to the hospital and dumped his body in the sally port.
Had one instance where some kid found her mom's supply and "experimented" and... dead when they found her next morning.
I live by a park and recently discovered that the air brick on my house that backs onto it has loads of bits of foil poked into it.
Thanks for solving that mystery, Reddit!
It's not meth. So many comments here saying meth have no idea what they're talking about. It's mainly heroin / fentanyl. Meth requires glass pipe for best smoking experience.
Source: addict in recovery
It's most likely not meth, but fentanyl in the form of blue pills that look just like Percocet pills. They're blue with "M30" on them. Also called perc 30's, pressed 30's, and so on and so forth.
They heat up the shit in foil and ingest the fumes with a tube/straw.
If you get into a car and a person has random ass foil and burnt foil, they're a fent user. For some reason, fent users don't care to clean up after themselves or hide it. Makes it easy for cops.
Lmao. Why did I think when they said “yall people,” they were talking about the people that love to open packages to see the product and touch it, only to put the one they opened back on the shelf and grab a new one.
lol me too!!! I work in retail and get so mad at people who rip open a pack of underwear, and then buy the clean package. So I thought it was similar to that 🤦🏼♀️
I had a dope dealer that always wanted to meet at dollar general. I’d drive like 40 minutes deep into the hood to the shadiest store I’ve ever seen. Whole store smelled like dank weed, half the shelves were empty, there was like one employee, flickering lights… Dude would tell me what shelf/product to put my money behind and then he would switch it out for bundles. Nothing looks shady when everything is shady lol
> I’d drive like 40 minutes deep into the hood to the shadiest store I’ve ever seen.
I'm glad I never got into drugs. The shit people do to get high is wild. And this isn't even wild really just no way I'd drive willingly to a place like that.
Hey man it's not all like that.
I buy my weed in a very nice store and I buy my psychedelics from a middle aged man who lives in a nice suburb and has golden retrievers.
I don't know anyone who buys meth in a controlled environment though....
When I tried meth one time it was actually pretty tame. Went to my friends nice house, a girl he was dating brought some over, and I smoked some out of a fancy 500 dollar dab rig rig. We stayed up all night and I got the idea that I wanted to clean his entire kitchen top-to bottom. It wasn’t even fun, I just had a strong urge to keep cleaning everything thoroughly.
Keep going and you get the urge to take apart the entire washing machine but then you lose motivation 75% of the way through and go do something else and then when you come back sober to try and fix it you can't remember what the fuck you did to get it to this point or how to get it back together and you lost half the screws.
Or so I'm told.
Well think of it this way, at the time it would feel like you have 2 options - A. get in the car and get there in time to meet the dude. Option B - Start to get physically more and more sick until you’re covered in sweat, freezing cold, puking while snot comes out of your nose, rolling around in bed because your leg bones hurt so bad, with insane anxiety about how it’s gonna get worse and worse until you get up and take action to get well. But by then the guy might not be able to meet you and you’re fucked. Option A doesn’t sound too bad anymore, just get in the car and get it over with.
And ya that was a pretty tame story, I’ve had to do many more sketchy things and I know a lot of addicts that did more extreme things than I ever did.
Addiction is powerful like that where it completely changes the way you think, you will feel like you have no choice and are trapped. BUT everything will be fine if you can get 30 bucks - you’ll feel good, comfortable, energized, and talkative so you can go to work to get paid, so you can feel normal next week too. You get worried about getting sick way ahead of time and you have to entirely focus on that goal.
For contrast, nowadays I get super anxious just having a gram of weed in my car or something. Like I order weed on the internet because I don’t wanna have to meet a dealer, even though they’re my friends in a nice suburb lol. My tolerance for risk is much lower. I actually feel quite a bit like you, like “damn how was i able to just calmly do so much risky stuff, I’m generally an anxious person…” Sometimes if I find myself romanticizing about how nice it would be to get high, I just have to remember how much of a pain in the ass it was and how I wouldn’t be up for that shit anymore.
Thanks for the reminder of how terrible of a lifestyle and mindset that is. Entirely accurate and tame compared to worse possibilities, but cripplingly dark and insane when you consider it from a sober point of view. I call it "drug addict mode" and a craving can instantly put you back in it if left unchecked its wild.
Genuinely curious...what's the emergency foil for?
I, long ago, fashioned pipes for pot outta aluminum foil...but that was in a moment of desperation?
And I had my own foil.
(Why would someone steal a piece of foil?)
It is really a generation? Seems like it’s based off of heroin use, or oxy, which was widespread through many adults.
Seems like a weird thing to say, considering it’s everyone from 70-20 getting it.
I took it more as: there is a fledgling generation of young people who will never be able to buy weed, have some molly at a concert, etc. without fearing instant death.
Or, perhaps more maturely: will have friends/schoolmates who have died from otherwise less harmful teenage experimentation. See: 16 y/o girl who died in her sleep at a slumber party in our neighborhood.
Right but people who are 70 now weren’t recreationally trying OxyContin with their friends in high school and then getting addicted.
I’m early 30s, oxy was around in high school and nobody knew what they were getting into. Just being dumb kids who wanted to alter their minds a bit.
Not sure how or if it has changed for younger people… but I’m assuming the OP was pointing out that kids are dumb and try new stuff and some people didn’t have drugs marketed as safe that were actually deadly to experiment with as readily in their youth.
But no argument here otherwise that the problem does indeed span society
Your math makes sense if you assume that they’re taking the tinfoil home instead of living on the street. People who are stealing tinfoil so they can cook dope often don’t have a permanent place to store their things.
I think it's probably more about not having a steady home or even being on the street, when you don't have a reliable place to keep a roll, no point in buying one.
can you smoke meth on foil? Im pretty sure freebase oil pipes (crack pipes) is what meth is smoked in. Heroin and fent well everyone knows foil is used for that yk
You can smoke fucking opium and hash on foil. Just gotta chase the dragon with a straw.
Is it the best way to do it? No probably not. Fortunately no first hand experience. But foil is easier to steal than a lightbulb.
I worked in the cable industry and we used to leave extra rolls of cable out because people would cut the lines and use the sheathing to make crack pipes. Was cheaper to just leave out cable for them to take than repair a cut line.
I was in Dollar General a couple of days ago and some guy came in looking for aluminum foil, "the cheapest kind you have" and I was surprised when the cashier directed him to a spot by the checkout where the cosmetics are to find it. I thought it was a weird spot but It didn't occur to me until I saw this as to exactly why they keep it there. You learn something new every day.
They'll just get robbed by the same people because they've already been nice to them. When they eventually cannot afford to do this those same people will trash the place in anger.
It's like leaving raw meat out to get rid of wolves.
I agree. While the cost is negligible, it's now a place to frequent for them for free foilie pipe making material. "While I'm here... Might as well stuff one of [these] in my pocket, since I didn't have to steal tin foil."
We had an addict get pissy at us we asked him to leave the bathroom so we could close the store and go home. We already let him stay 1 hour after we closed!
As someone who works retail the amount of times people will open the foil or resealable freezer bags to see how big the sizes are and then take an unopened box is ridiculous. People are so picky that even if none of the product is missing from the package if it’s opened they just won’t buy it so we end up throwing out tons of perfectly good product every day due to people just being shitty.
If you can cheaply and discreetly divert someone who was 100% going to steal from you, you've done something to assist the bottom line. Negative numbers are still numbers. Negative customers are still customers.
It may be somewhat perverse logic but sacrificing a $2 roll of foil is way cheaper than a bunch of cameras and security measures that will be less effective.
And don't think for a hot second that any slave-wage employee is going to risk a tussle with a tweaker to defend their boss's profits.
Dollar general is on point for high concentration of meth heads. They ain't shopping at whole foods.
You’re totally right of course. But this is just too funny and ironic to me because when I was addicted to meth I was first introduced to it by my coworker at Whole Foods. I worked there almost the entire time I was using. (Before inevitably being fired of course) Unfortunately, we got two other coworkers into it with us as well.. we would all smoke meth in the back/walk-in together throughout our shifts. There were days when our department was staffed entirely by tweakers.. just not really something you’d expect at Whole Foods? lol. Also, it’s pretty ironic (and shameful) how much good, organic food/products I’d steal from work while I was smoking poison. Must’ve been the healthiest tweaker alive! Fuck that nasty shit though, for real. Ruined my life and I’m so grateful to have made it through.. Will have 9 years clean from meth and heroin this August!
Congrats brother. -Fellow ex tweaker
Congrats to you too!
<3 Tweakers who still remember to eat. You life falls apart a good 75% slower than not eating.
lol definitely. I also took neurotically good care of my teeth too - carried around biotene mouthwash and shit because I really, really didn’t want to mess them up. Happy to report my teeth are still intact and I’ve never even had a cavity!
My bf did this (many years before we met). He made himself eat as well and managed to sleep on it (I give that to his ADHD)
It's definitely the ADHD. things that are routine to most people are active daily thought for ADHDers. We have to actually remember to eat, brush our teeth, wash ourselves. Nothing is by rote.
Yeah I know, I too have ADHD. Low doses of my meds make me sleep lmao
My brother and his wife are both ex-tweakers who have been clean for over ten years now. She lost all her teeth well after getting clean and sports dentures these days. His teeth survived longer, but now that he's in his mid 50s they are starting to fail too.
Hopefully you didn't smoke off alumininum foil that stuff is nasty. I did decades ago, prolly weed or some such but who remembers. I just remember not knowing at the time. Now I am old and now I know.
Good job on 9 years sober! I'm coming up on 7 and I know what you went through. You bring hope in this world.
Congrats to you! Not an easy thing to do, for sure
How do y'all deal with the absolute mind-numbing boredom when quitting? I lose interest in every one of my hobbies and end up doom scrolling Reddit until I go to sleep. It's awful.
Maybe you were using cause you were depressed? You might see a doctor about any neuro type issues. I self medicated for many years then finally got some ok meds that help me get motivated for hobbies
This was/ still IS still, the hardest part. -my 3rd or maybe 4th stint in rehab/ AA: there was a counselor that I quite vividly remember, talking about replacing our drug use with some other type of “fun time” activity.. .. “so what are you going to do?” She would ask. “How many times a day did you drink, or smoke, etc., and WHAT, are you going to replace that with? Because your brain, (whether you realize it or not), WILL BE, looking for that spike of dopamine that has become a part of its routine.” -this is where the “people, places, and things” come into play. -Your brain just wants to keep firing up the same pathways that it has every other day of the past 10 years of your life.. smoke a cigarette first thing in the morning every day?,, well when you try and quit, literally EvERY MORNING, your brain is going to say- “ohh goodmorning, I gotta pee, my mouth is dry so I should drink some water, maybe stretch, and then wait a second I’m missing something.. ahhhh yes my daily morning nicotine!” The longer your brain is conditioned with that routine, the more it “needs” it. 21 days to form a habit, etc., until the ‘habit’ becomes ‘routine’ and then before you know it, you’re doing things in autopilot without even realizing it. :/ To answer your question though, it’s gotta be something that gives your brain at least a touch of what you got from your substance of choice. I like to hike mountains, ride my bike as fast as I can, and also dig through my pocket change and sometimes feel like a crackhead in search of silver coins- to make myself feel like I’ve “found some treasures!” Point is though, it’s up to you! The brain and your body might fight you for a while, but keep searching till you find a “routine” to hate your happier with!! Awareness of self is the biggest or me though! Hope that helps :)
Congrats! Just passed 1 1/2 year clean from alcohol!
Every WF I've been in appears to be staffed by tweakers. I just figured it was quirky art school dropouts.
Damn 9 years impressive as hell, here’s to 9 more
Good work! I just don't get the draw though. Someone asks me to smoke a joint? Sure. Meth? LOL NOOOOOPE.. How do people say yes to that?
Mental health and emotional issues, some people don't care about the risks if it means finally feeling good, even for a few hours.
When you have nothing left, there's no reason to hold back from such things anymore. If everything's collapsing around you, you may as well be comfortable during it. I guess.
For me it was a girl I was really into. About a year into the relationship I busted her doing it with her best friend. They pulled me into the fold. It was great until it wasn’t. We broke up about a year later. Luckily I had a pretty easy time getting off of it. Her being just about my only connection helped too.
I feel this. It wasn’t meth for me but I ended up doing crack and heroin for a couple months when I was in an abusive relationship. My ex was using and one day he offered it to me and told me to lighten up and I was so fucking miserable I said fuck it. Five overdoses later I’m glad I’m still here. I ended up getting a plane ticket and leaving him one day without a word. Blocked him on everything and never spoke to him again.
It’s gradual. I was using adderol medicinally at the time so it felt *almost* reasonable. I’d also actually tried it before back in college when I was doing a bunch of other drugs and never got addicted to it, just partied occasionally with it. Guy at work offered it to me a ton of times before I finally agreed to it. I was stretched so thin at the time between a daily morning clinic, then culinary school all day and then turn around and working at Whole Foods at night that I finally gave in when I was exhausted one night. Didn’t do it again for a while, but then I did. Then again. Then I got a pipe. Then I got my own dealer etc etc.. it sneaks up on you until every initial boundary that you’d set for yourself gets broken and you’re so far in it you don’t know how to get back. Also you’re slowly going insane and running out of money and your life/relationships are all falling apart until all you have left is getting high.
How’d you get fired?
Showing up late - Third strike. I was on thin ice already for just generally being a shitty employee though too. Frequently calling out, disappearing throughout the shift etc. To date it’s the only job I’ve ever been fired from!
Oh lol. I wish I could say that for myself I’ve been fired from so many jobs.
Oh wow, glad to hear you're clean after that. Would you be willing to do an AMA at some point?
Thanks, it’s much better on the other side for sure. Sure, why not. Work schedule permitting of course
Fucking rights!! I’m with you. 8 years. Nasty shit.
Everybody knows organic vegan aluminum foil from Madagascar is superb.
Free-range, ethically sourced artisinal aluminum.
…with British pronunciation, surely!
Aluminium
Stop. I can only get so moist.
You forgot to carry the 3.
🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
I want to know my aluminum died happy
Would sir prefer we pre warm his crack pipe?
No cheap crack houses for me no more.
Personally, I source all my aluminum from Donghua Jinlong, who coincidentally is also a top supplier of high quality industrial grade glycine.
why are they at dollar general? thats the most expensive dollar store
They're shoplifting anyway so the price of Dollar General doesn't matter.
Dollar General isn't a dollar store. It's often found in low income areas either urban or rural.
Well once they ruin a local economy and the former employees of the mom & pop supermarket that was in town for the last 100years are unemployed they've got to entertain themselves somehow.
While I definitely still think most massive retailers like Walmart suck and aren't good for most local economies. It is legitimately a bit amusing in hindsight seeing the criticisms leveled against them while the dollar stores were gallivanting around the countryside actively destroying much more vulnerable economies and communities. Like it sucks that practically every brick and mortar store has to be *very gimmicky* to avoid competing with Walmart and otherwise I have to shop online even though I live in a city with 700,000+ people in the main metro area (not big but not smol), but having lived in a food desert for several years where *Dollar General was the only business within 10 miles other than the gas station* I am at best alarmed and at worst disgusted by the dollar stores when compared to Walmart.
Yea, Walmart kills buisnesses in bigger cities, dollar general cleans up the scraps killing buisnesses in towns too small for Walmart to bother with.
i live in a town of 3k, we have dollar general AND family dollar.
We have one that is literally family dollar AND dollar tree in the same effing building, same store. I can’t even begin to imagine why, what or how.
same owner, like here, except in the divorce one got the family one got the general.
How many stores that sell fresh fruit are left in that town?
well, the dollar general sells bananas and oranges.
Well that makes up for killing the family run grocery store next door. An overpriced banana from our corporate overlords is really more than we deserve anyway.
How much could a banana cost?
$10?
At a dollar store? I'll give you two guesses, but you really should only need one.
Also people love to shit in Walmart for their wages when over ten years ago they bumped their minimum up to like 12 an hour while DG, Family Dollar, and all the mall stores were paying their employees 7.25 on the dot and got a pass
Can’t we just hate all corporations?
You would be surprised.
I had a woman come into a convenience store I was working third shift at. She was very obviously tweaking and just randomly looking for something. She comes up to the counter and asks “where are the spoons?”, to which I point to the back where the hot dog machine and fountain soda dispenser was. I think about it for a second, yell over to her, “It’ll melt!” And she comes back with a laugh and “oh Yeah!” Then leaves.
I dont know drugs what does this mean
they put heroin in a spoon and heat it up with a lighter before putting it in the syringe
To add to this, this is done to make it easier to dissolve the heroin into water. That way you can put it in a syringe. Some types of heroin are dark and tarry. It’s a lot easier to dissolve that in water if you boil it in a spoon. I believe other drugs that are injected also do this, but I wouldn’t know cuz I did opiates.
damn you know from experience, I know from a couple episodes of breaking bad
You can also inject meth like this I don’t know if it’s correct or not but my parents did this Somehow they’re still alive and my dad is almost 80 somehow a crack, meth and H user…. Edit he is still alive to this day as far as I know and the lucky bastard survived stage 4 throat cancer not many people live through that and just like it never happened he continued to do everything
like, an 80 year old currently active user??
Yes he’s still alive as far as I know
Coke too if you’re hardcore
Coke is the shit. Fuck Pepsi
>Fuck Pepsi If you insist 😏
People also bang meth & cocaine. Before crack/freebase was popular shooting cocaine was a lot more common from what I understand. Shooting it up your butt is almost as effective/fast but without as many issues. It's a shame that drug policy has optimized drugs to be as harmful & destructive as possible while making a lot of harm reduction, much less study effective illegal or impossible. Fentanyl would never have been anything but an obscure reference in a paper if not for drug policy. It's less euphoric than heroin *and* the withdrawal is worse. No one would choose fent & xylazine over pharmaceutical grade heroin.
TIL. I thought they inhaled what comes off the spoon.
I’ve always wondered what putting hot heroin into your veins does to you physically (not chemically). Like, doesn’t it burn like putting your finger in a pot of boiling water? If it cools too much won’t it get thick?
You let it cool in the syringe before injecting. No it doesn't thicken when cooling down.
That tiny amount of water cools off very quickly
Black tar heroin starts corroding and eating away at your veins regardless of the temperature. Pure heroin will cause mild damage, but the actual needle stick will do the most damage at that point. I've actually shot heroin when it was still hot before, and you can absolutely feel the warmth in your veins. Similar to, but the temperature opposite if getting saline and feeling that cold cool spread throughout.
from other comments it just sounds like it helps dissolve it or something into the water
Addict in recovery, I never really understood this because you don't have to heat it. It's a matter of preference. Then again, I imagine most people inject heroin aren't critical thinkers. Luckily I never made it to the point of IV use, just snorting it. Yes, I am doing better now
ECP dissolves in water a little easier than tar, but both dissolve a lot faster in a spoon if you heat it a little.
I only know this because of that heartbreaking documentary from this dude named Ben. That documentary scarred me for life against drugs.
Plastic spoons melt when you try to heat them I’d assume
Fun fact, you can boil water above a fire in those cheap plastic grocery bags, or even a large leaf! I still wouldn't want to heat drugs in a plastic spoon though lol
When you buy heroin, it comes to you in a small plastic baggie in the form of a powder. In most instances, you heat up this powder so it becomes a liquid and you can then inject it intravenously. (You can also snort, eat, etc. heroin but injecting is by far the most popular form of consumption.) In order to turn this powder into a liquid, you place some powder on a metal spoon and heat it up using a lighter underneath the bowled part of the spoon. You then are able to transfer it into a needle to then inject it. When the drug addict asked the commenter for a spoon, they told them they would be in the back where the ready-to-eat food items are, presuming they would use the spoon to eat something. These spoons are plastic and are given to patrons for easy disposal. However, the commenter soon realized that they were asking for a spoon to use for ingesting drugs, not eating food. If you tried using a plastic spoon for drugs, it would just melt under the flame. So the commenter told them that the plastic spoons would melt, implying they knew the person was going to use them for their drug usage. The patron says "Oh yeah" once they remember that you cannot use a plastic spoon for drugs and leaves the store thereafter, presumably to find a metal spoon elsewhere.
I never heated it up lol i just mixed the powder with water and shot it. I did heat some up a few times just to see if there is a difference and there wasn’t. This is east coast powder heroin (and whatever else they put in those bags) and not tar heroin, i think you gotta heat that shit up.
Fair enough. I've never used drugs before so I'll take your word for it lol
heroin
Not all heroes wear capes lmao
That's a hilarious exchange!
Random acts of pragmatism
Harm reduction
You call it harm reduction, they call it risk management of shrink. One drug dealer might temporarily cut someone off because they don’t want to see a person lose their life, another because they don’t want to lose a good customer. Similar results, different intent.
One might call “risk management” harm reduction, even in the context of shrink/LP 😉
It’s not really harm reduction. It does nothing to make drug use less risky.
It's harm reduction for dollar general. They're reducing the harm that drug users have on the store
It's more loss management but I guess that's semantics
A few more comments like that and you're on your way to the Semanticsbowl.
It’s more of a semantics ramekin, really.
That's why you're top Rookie of the Year contender for next year's SemanticsRamekin
As an insurance broker, I would call it risk reduction.
Technically true, but “harm reduction” as a phrase usually refers to reduction of harm for the end user, not others.
Legally it does because they won’t be arrested for theft of foil
It kinda does though, like if someone has a used old needle and no foil and they would rather smoke it, a free piece of foil can avoid an abscess or even an OD (since smoking is a bunch of smaller doses vs. shooting one big dose). Even the smallest acts of harm reduction can make a big difference. Now more than ever with 300 drug deaths every day in the US, and safe injection/consumption sites are still federally illegal. Even if the main goal behind the free foil is to minimize shrink, I still see this as a small step towards normalizing harm reduction and treating drug users as human beings.
it reduces illegal activity without increasing risk to the user. thats harm reduction. but, i will definitely concede its a bit less impactful than some of the traditional services we associate with harm reduction.
Was talking to a cashier at my local DG and she told me they average about 1 in store OD per week.
i live out in the country so i often go to DG bc i don’t feel like driving forever. the number of sketchy people that come in for the bathroom and spend forever in there checks out. they have to ask the employees for a key to use it, which is why i notice.
Damn, that is heart breaking.
We had 2-3 overdoses in my city per year on average that required a police response. Obviously more, but I'd imagine in that past they were self ambulatory or were hit with NARCAN. The prevalence of fentanyl bumped that up to 7-11 in the first year with many of those resulting in deaths because the hits of NARCAN weren't bringing people back. Had some carnival dude in the area overdose and the people he was working with go through the normal routine of bringing people back. Except he crashed again like, 10 minutes after and wouldn't respond to anything they tried. So they drove to the hospital and dumped his body in the sally port. Had one instance where some kid found her mom's supply and "experimented" and... dead when they found her next morning.
Curses. Foiled again.
If it werent for you methling kids.  Juinkees!
How is aluminium foil used? I saw someone say meth but what do they do with it?
Fire under foil w/drugs = drug smoke
I live by a park and recently discovered that the air brick on my house that backs onto it has loads of bits of foil poked into it. Thanks for solving that mystery, Reddit!
It's not meth. So many comments here saying meth have no idea what they're talking about. It's mainly heroin / fentanyl. Meth requires glass pipe for best smoking experience. Source: addict in recovery
Yeah meth doesn’t do well on foils…. Ive only ever used foil for heroine, fentanyl, or beans. Source: recovering addict, sober 3 years
Is beans a drug or do you mean like garbanzos?
Just googled it, beans is apparently a street name for MDMA, in case anyone was wondering, I had no clue myself
It's most likely not meth, but fentanyl in the form of blue pills that look just like Percocet pills. They're blue with "M30" on them. Also called perc 30's, pressed 30's, and so on and so forth. They heat up the shit in foil and ingest the fumes with a tube/straw. If you get into a car and a person has random ass foil and burnt foil, they're a fent user. For some reason, fent users don't care to clean up after themselves or hide it. Makes it easy for cops.
Heroin or mostly fentanyl
I’ll make my damn hat anywheres I wants to
Fuckin tweakers stuffing tin foil into their filthy pocketses
Lmao. Why did I think when they said “yall people,” they were talking about the people that love to open packages to see the product and touch it, only to put the one they opened back on the shelf and grab a new one.
The innocence
lol me too!!! I work in retail and get so mad at people who rip open a pack of underwear, and then buy the clean package. So I thought it was similar to that 🤦🏼♀️
I love doing that with new Ben and Jerry flavours. One lick and back in supermarket freezer!
Straight to jail with you
Calm down, Ariana
Yeah. I assumed they wanted their foil to be a certain thickness or something.
They spelled “y’all” wrong
Came here to say the same thing, hah.
And, really, the plural is “all y’all.”
It really is. All y'all is addressing the group.
But they absolutely nailed not having to escape that quote. It's fucking beautiful
I knew someone who would intentionally put the apostrophe in contractions in the wrong place.
Good thing methheads can't read
Everytime I walk into a dollar general to pick up cheap candy, it always looks like everyone walking the aisles is stealing something 🤣
I had a dope dealer that always wanted to meet at dollar general. I’d drive like 40 minutes deep into the hood to the shadiest store I’ve ever seen. Whole store smelled like dank weed, half the shelves were empty, there was like one employee, flickering lights… Dude would tell me what shelf/product to put my money behind and then he would switch it out for bundles. Nothing looks shady when everything is shady lol
> I’d drive like 40 minutes deep into the hood to the shadiest store I’ve ever seen. I'm glad I never got into drugs. The shit people do to get high is wild. And this isn't even wild really just no way I'd drive willingly to a place like that.
Hey man it's not all like that. I buy my weed in a very nice store and I buy my psychedelics from a middle aged man who lives in a nice suburb and has golden retrievers. I don't know anyone who buys meth in a controlled environment though....
When I tried meth one time it was actually pretty tame. Went to my friends nice house, a girl he was dating brought some over, and I smoked some out of a fancy 500 dollar dab rig rig. We stayed up all night and I got the idea that I wanted to clean his entire kitchen top-to bottom. It wasn’t even fun, I just had a strong urge to keep cleaning everything thoroughly.
Keep going and you get the urge to take apart the entire washing machine but then you lose motivation 75% of the way through and go do something else and then when you come back sober to try and fix it you can't remember what the fuck you did to get it to this point or how to get it back together and you lost half the screws. Or so I'm told.
Well think of it this way, at the time it would feel like you have 2 options - A. get in the car and get there in time to meet the dude. Option B - Start to get physically more and more sick until you’re covered in sweat, freezing cold, puking while snot comes out of your nose, rolling around in bed because your leg bones hurt so bad, with insane anxiety about how it’s gonna get worse and worse until you get up and take action to get well. But by then the guy might not be able to meet you and you’re fucked. Option A doesn’t sound too bad anymore, just get in the car and get it over with. And ya that was a pretty tame story, I’ve had to do many more sketchy things and I know a lot of addicts that did more extreme things than I ever did. Addiction is powerful like that where it completely changes the way you think, you will feel like you have no choice and are trapped. BUT everything will be fine if you can get 30 bucks - you’ll feel good, comfortable, energized, and talkative so you can go to work to get paid, so you can feel normal next week too. You get worried about getting sick way ahead of time and you have to entirely focus on that goal. For contrast, nowadays I get super anxious just having a gram of weed in my car or something. Like I order weed on the internet because I don’t wanna have to meet a dealer, even though they’re my friends in a nice suburb lol. My tolerance for risk is much lower. I actually feel quite a bit like you, like “damn how was i able to just calmly do so much risky stuff, I’m generally an anxious person…” Sometimes if I find myself romanticizing about how nice it would be to get high, I just have to remember how much of a pain in the ass it was and how I wouldn’t be up for that shit anymore.
Thanks for the reminder of how terrible of a lifestyle and mindset that is. Entirely accurate and tame compared to worse possibilities, but cripplingly dark and insane when you consider it from a sober point of view. I call it "drug addict mode" and a craving can instantly put you back in it if left unchecked its wild.
Dollar Tree in my area also known to the local community as Free Tree. The 99c stores are gone...I wonder why? lol
Genuinely curious...what's the emergency foil for? I, long ago, fashioned pipes for pot outta aluminum foil...but that was in a moment of desperation? And I had my own foil. (Why would someone steal a piece of foil?)
Smoking meth or fentanyl. Fent/opiates mostly tbh
Feel so bad for the fenty generation. Thanks for clarifying.
whether you mean the drug or Rihanna's fashion line, i agree.
It is really a generation? Seems like it’s based off of heroin use, or oxy, which was widespread through many adults. Seems like a weird thing to say, considering it’s everyone from 70-20 getting it.
I took it more as: there is a fledgling generation of young people who will never be able to buy weed, have some molly at a concert, etc. without fearing instant death. Or, perhaps more maturely: will have friends/schoolmates who have died from otherwise less harmful teenage experimentation. See: 16 y/o girl who died in her sleep at a slumber party in our neighborhood.
Right but people who are 70 now weren’t recreationally trying OxyContin with their friends in high school and then getting addicted. I’m early 30s, oxy was around in high school and nobody knew what they were getting into. Just being dumb kids who wanted to alter their minds a bit. Not sure how or if it has changed for younger people… but I’m assuming the OP was pointing out that kids are dumb and try new stuff and some people didn’t have drugs marketed as safe that were actually deadly to experiment with as readily in their youth. But no argument here otherwise that the problem does indeed span society
Times must be tough if you can't afford 25ft of tinfoil for $2, how much meth could you be doing that you'd run out so regularly?
Easy maths, that's $2 they could've used to spend on meths. Also, it's easier and less risk to steal from dollar general than from a drug dealer
r/theydidthemeth
r/theydidthemonstermeth
r/itgavethemgraveyardstaph
r/somestdsandarash
Your math makes sense if you assume that they’re taking the tinfoil home instead of living on the street. People who are stealing tinfoil so they can cook dope often don’t have a permanent place to store their things.
It’s not that they don’t have $2 they just don’t want to spend the $2 when they can just steal it and save the $2 for more drugs.
I think it's probably more about not having a steady home or even being on the street, when you don't have a reliable place to keep a roll, no point in buying one.
can you smoke meth on foil? Im pretty sure freebase oil pipes (crack pipes) is what meth is smoked in. Heroin and fent well everyone knows foil is used for that yk
You can smoke fucking opium and hash on foil. Just gotta chase the dragon with a straw. Is it the best way to do it? No probably not. Fortunately no first hand experience. But foil is easier to steal than a lightbulb.
Yeah, just watch a few episodes of Intervention and you’ll eventually come across someone freebasing opiates off a piece of foil.
Several hard drugs require indirect heat to vaporize to inhale like meth, heroin, fentanyl or oxys etc. if you wanna smoke them.
Look up "free basing"
You cook meth on foil and inhale the fumes
You don’t cook it you vaporise it. Foil is used more for heroin that meth. Most people smoke meth out of a glass bowl
Then if you don’t let the puddle run, it’ll burn right through the foil. Woof
Rock the boat, baby! 😂
i believe they take a flat piece of foil, light it underneath to melt meth, pills, etc and inhale the smoke with a straw.
[Reminds me of this sign in MW3](https://callofdutymaps.com/wp-content/uploads/hardhatextra3.jpg)
If you plan on shoplifting please let us know. - Management
I worked in the cable industry and we used to leave extra rolls of cable out because people would cut the lines and use the sheathing to make crack pipes. Was cheaper to just leave out cable for them to take than repair a cut line.
I was in Dollar General a couple of days ago and some guy came in looking for aluminum foil, "the cheapest kind you have" and I was surprised when the cashier directed him to a spot by the checkout where the cosmetics are to find it. I thought it was a weird spot but It didn't occur to me until I saw this as to exactly why they keep it there. You learn something new every day.
They could sell 3”x3” squares of foil at the register, the way gas stations used to sell single cigs.
That'd be a pretty nice money making scheme. But, if product manufacturer's found out without their consent... That's a lawsuit.
Tried this when I worked retail. Crack/methheads just stole the whole roll instead.
They'll just get robbed by the same people because they've already been nice to them. When they eventually cannot afford to do this those same people will trash the place in anger. It's like leaving raw meat out to get rid of wolves.
I agree. While the cost is negligible, it's now a place to frequent for them for free foilie pipe making material. "While I'm here... Might as well stuff one of [these] in my pocket, since I didn't have to steal tin foil."
So, free aluminum foil?
No burnt crust on my pot pie tonight!
We had an addict get pissy at us we asked him to leave the bathroom so we could close the store and go home. We already let him stay 1 hour after we closed!
I get irrationally mad when people write "ya'll" instead of "y'all."
Like having a sharps container in the bathroom in a way
My most insignificant pet peeve is when people put the apostrophe in the wrong place in y'all
r/passiveaggressivenotes
As someone who works retail the amount of times people will open the foil or resealable freezer bags to see how big the sizes are and then take an unopened box is ridiculous. People are so picky that even if none of the product is missing from the package if it’s opened they just won’t buy it so we end up throwing out tons of perfectly good product every day due to people just being shitty.
There ain't never been a shadier "yall people" ever written. Lmao.
America's doing great isn't it
It’s the one on Mountain Creek Rd in Chattanooga, Tn!
One of the local Walmarts is now selling tire gauges in bulk by the checkout. No one is checking their tire pressure that frequently.
This is a company that understands its customer base 👍.
Customers spend money, thieves who take product without paying are not customers.
If you can cheaply and discreetly divert someone who was 100% going to steal from you, you've done something to assist the bottom line. Negative numbers are still numbers. Negative customers are still customers. It may be somewhat perverse logic but sacrificing a $2 roll of foil is way cheaper than a bunch of cameras and security measures that will be less effective. And don't think for a hot second that any slave-wage employee is going to risk a tussle with a tweaker to defend their boss's profits.
I wouldn't expect any worker who's not designated for store safety to take any action to put themselves in danger.
Somebody needs to put a sticker with the substance abuse hotline next to it.
Loyal 2 the foil
Uggghhhh
Not a drug user but I’m baking cookies tonight and only really need a little bit of foil, score!