You might have heard of this one due to the panic that went through the internet a while back that Jenkem was turning our kids into mindless zombies. You can kind of understand why, because Jenkem is a drug made of poo. The idea is that you collect faeces and urine, leave them to stew in a warm place (a lovely sunny windowsill, perhaps), then take the lid off and huff the noxious gasses that the fermented excreta give off. The effects are supposed to consist of sustained auditory and visual hallucinations. It is supposed to have originated in Zambia or South Africa as a favourite tipple of the local street kids. Well, at least it would be, if it wasn't a total hoax. There is very little evidence to suggest that Jenkem is actually anything other than another thing for suburban soccer moms to wring their hands about. In fact, it actually sounds a lot like the kind of thing a canny street kid would tell a well-meaning but overly-earnest aid worker. To be fair, the idea of getting a bunch of white college kids to huff their own bum gas is pretty hilarious. The fact that we would so easily believe that kids in Africa (and it is often reported to be generally "Africa" rather than a specific country) are huffing their own s**t says a lot more about our attitudes than it does about them. There's nothing to suggest that the gasses given off by fermenting faeces would produce any kind of hallucinogenic reaction. After all, this is surely something that we would have noticed in our sewerage workers by now if it were true. However, that didn't stop many major news outlets from running stories on it without any proper evidence or research. Long story short, don't inhale your poop gas.
