July 15, 1997

Dope Definitions

The next time you order a sandwich with mayo and lettuce, make sure you’re out of earshot of federal agents, who are getting up to speed on drug-related street slang with some help from the White House.

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The Office of National Drug Control Policy’s Information Clearinghouse has posted a list of more than 2,000 drug terms culled from the Internet, press articles, and various agencies, according to “Leslie” at the ONDCP (where workers aren’t allowed to give out their last names).

Some of the terms are relatively innocent, others will give you a chuckle. But some of the definitions will leave you wondering if the government hasn’t been just a little too credulous. After all, how often have you heard about PCP mixed with peanut butter? Or PCP laced with gasoline?

We’ll just tell you up front that the mojo entry on the list has nothing to do with us. The following is a sampling to keep you in the know: Aroma of men: isobutyl nitrite

Balling: vaginally implanted cocaine

Bart Simpson: heroin

Beat artist: someone selling bogus drugs

Beavis & Butthead; Elvis; Felix the Cat; Pink Panther: LSD

Bogart a joint: salivate on a marijuana cigarette; refuse to share

Buck: shoot someone in the head

Buffer: crack smoker; woman who exchanges oral sex for crack

Casper the ghost: crack

Chipper: occasional Hispanic user

Chocolate ecstasy: crack made brown by adding chocolate milk powder during production

Closet baser: user of crack who prefers anonymity

Garbage heads: users who buy crack from street dealers instead of cooking it themselves

Geezin a bit of dee gee: injecting a drug

Graduate: completely stop using drugs OR progress to stronger drugs

Ground control: guide or caretaker during a hallucinogenic experience

Hamburger helper: crack

Hen picking: searching on hands and knees for crack

Highbeams: the wide eyes of a person on crack

Hot heroin: poisoned to give to a police informant

Hubba pigeon: crack user looking for rocks on a floor after a police raid

Jim Jones: marijuana laced with cocaine and PCP

Kabuki; Maserati: crack pipe made from a plastic rum bottle and a rubber sparkplug cover

Lettuce: money

Lipton tea: inferior quality drugs

Mayo: cocaine; heroin

Mojo: cocaine; heroin

Nontoucher: crack user who doesn’t want affection during or after smoking crack

Octane: PCP laced with gasoline

Pancakes and syrup: combination of glutethimide and codeine cough syrup

Peanut butter: PCP mixed with peanut butter

Pepsi habit: occasional use of drugs

Perp: fake crack made of candle wax and baking soda

Pig Killer: PCP

Pullers: crack users who pull at parts of their bodies excessively

Raspberry; Rock star; Toss up: female who trades sex for crack or money to buy crack

Roid rage: aggressive behavior caused by excessive steroid use

Sandwich: two layers of cocaine with a layer of heroin in the middle

Skin popping: injecting drugs under the skin

Snot balls: rubber cement rolled into balls and burned

Taxing: price paid to enter a crackhouse; charging more per vial depending on race of customer or if not a regular customer

Toilet water: inhalant

Toucher: user of crack who wants affection before, during, or after smoking crack

Tutti-frutti: flavored cocaine developed by a Brazilian gang

Yen sleep: restless, drowsy state after LSD use

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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