Forget about bath salts, there’s a new weird drug craze in town… I found this article from Pakistan’s daily news service Dawn really fascinating. The topic? How smoking dead scorpions is the new dangerous drug “thing.” I had no clue you could smoke dead scorpions to get high. Did you? Apparently the addiction is way worse than with opium and a lot harder to get off of.
[Seventy-four-year-old Sohbat Khan’s] addiction to opium doesn’t bother him as much; Sohbat says opium’s affects [sic] are far safer than scorpion smoking. He knows his body is too old to bear the high, but there are days he still feels the pull.
“Chars aw powder kho asi gup dai,” Sohbat says in way of explanation—“Hashish and heroin’s so-called relief is nothing in front of scorpion.”
~snip
During his years of addiction, Sohbat remembers madly roaming around his house and village, hunting for scorpions. Often, when the need was too overwhelming and there was no scorpion in sight, he would make his way to Peshawar. “It’s a worst form of addiction,” he says in Pashto.
“I would inhale the smoke coming out of the fire,” Sohbat says, although it is the tail that addicts really want—its poisonous venom makes for dangerous addiction.
Kids these days. What will they think of next?
via Boing Boing