Monday, November 1, 2010

racehorse charlie

Today I took a drug test. The process of peeing in a receptacle is funny enough but the truly amusing aspect of this whole experience lay in the written material that accompanied the test.

There was a list of illegal drugs that would trigger the test. It read as a list in 3 columns.

In the 1st column was the proper name of the drug or the active ingredient in the drug. In the 2nd column was an arbitrary abbreviation that the drug testing company assigned to each intoxicant (column 2 was really unnecessary) The 3rd column...well the 3rd column was a list of "street names" for each drug; euphemisms that would hip parents and square authority figures to the vernacular of the stoner adolescents or burn-out employees so that everyone was on the same page.

I don't know who decided on the "street names" but they were apparently flown in on a time machine from the pages of a Beat-era William Burroughs novel. I have never heard most of these names used before, in fact I'm pretty sure that if these slang terms were ever legitimate they applied to pharmaceutical drugs that were long out of production by 1979.

The 3 columns read as follows:

Marijuana THC pot, grass, weed, dank, ganja, bud, hydro, zig zag
Cocaine COC coke, racehorse charlie, yeyo, blow, nose nachos, hooter, crank
Methamphetamine MET crystal, speedballs, crank, speed, glass
Amphetamines AMP speed, gaggler, black beauties, beanies, pep pills, lid poppers
Ecstacy MDMA E, XTC, X, disco biscuits
Opiates OPI gun powder, morphine, smack, H, corage pills, horse, bomb, heroin
Phencyclidine PCP angel dust, rocket fuel, wack, ozone, fry
Benzodiazepines BZO downers, tranks, benzos
Methadone MTD done, fizzies, chocolate chip cookies, juice, water
Barbiturates BAR barbs, birds, red devils, yellow jackets, block busters
Oxycodone OXY oxy, killers, OC, oxycotton


BTW, my test was negative on all counts :)


not MY kid...


drug test results that Ian MacKaye would be proud of...