Jenkem – The Unholy Ghost Fart

If you’ve never heard of Jenkem before prepare to have your mind blown. First, I want to put a disclaimer out that although this isn’t technically a fart topic, it still deserves a major shout-out here on FartShare because it’s so closely related to one that I would challenge you to try to distinguish between the two.

Jenkem is a fairly new craze and one of the more recent hallucinogenic drugs to hit the (black) market. The totally amazing thing is that it is a drug made from fermented human fecal matter. POOP! Yes, some genius somewhere discovered that there is a way to use poop fumes as a drug. And what else is a poop fume other than another way to describe a fart?

According to an article by BBC News, this drug causes potent audio and visual hallucinations that can last for an hour. This is how one user described his trip in that article: “With glue, I just hear voices in my head. But with Jenkem, I see visions. I see my mother who is dead and I forget about the problems in my life.” A class act to say the least.

How does Jenkem work?

The drug works in a way comparable to Whippets, temporarily depriving the brain of oxygen. While huffing turd fumes and seeing your dead mothers ghost all day might sound like a great way to spend an afternoon…. or lifetime… prolonged periods of asphyxia (lack of oxygen) can cause serious health risks including permanent brain damage, a condition which is known in the jenkem circle as brain-not-work-so-good-ness. Possibly even a worse side effect is the fact that the shit taste in the user’s mouth lasts not only for a short time but days. DAYS. Everything you eat for DAYS afterward tastes very literally like shit. Imagine shit-flavored toast, shit-flavored bananas, shit-flavored sandwiches, and shit-flavored coffee (you know- the kind you can get from Starbucks). Expanding on this just a little bit, picture shit-flavored making out with your significant other.

The drug became popular in the mid-1990s in impoverished countries (read: Africa) as a cheap alternative to sniffing glue–you know, because who has that kind of cash lying around? Street names for this perplexing drug can be incredible; some of my personal favorites are butt hash, Leroy jenkems, and Winnie (as in Winnie the Pooh).

It’s no surprise that this drug emerged from the bowels of hell in the 90s–when the world was totally paranoid of shutting down because of the dreaded Y2K bug, models were portrayed as disgustingly thin, dark monsters, morbid TV show X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries were raging successes, and grunge music was unavoidable. As a society, we put ourselves in such a depressing slump that maybe sniffing turd fumes was inevitable. Anyway, I can’t think of a time in my past that I would have been more willing to try it.

Joking aside, Jenkem is a real drug and I have one more thing to say on the subject, a piece of advice stated best from the movie Scarface: “Never get high on your own supply.”

And don’t forget to Share Your Farts!