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Those all sound like urban legends. The coffee stirrers are for ... stirring your coffee. They look like a small spoon just because that shape works well for s
by tomerv 5y ago
Those all sound like urban legends.
The coffee stirrers are for ... stirring your coffee. They look like a small spoon just because that shape works well for stirring the beverage.
- howLongHowLong 5y agoThe glass rose is definitely for smoking crack. Else why is it ofen sold as a combo with a peice of (also-required) chore-boy. 5 bucks for both. Usually on the same shelf with the round-ended meth pipes which dont seem to require any cover but being called "oil burner"
- derefr 5y agoDon't forget the modern incarnation, borosilicate-glass "reusable drinking straws." Now up-market grocery stores can get in on the action!
- pessimizer 5y agoNot that they can't be repurposed, but imo the main reason for those is that it's hard to tell when your steel straw is dirty.
- MisterTea 5y agohttps://www.mentalfloss.com/article/642413/mcdonalds-cocaine-spoon-controversy https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/642413/mcdonalds-cocaine... The others were listed in a similar article. The small tire pressure gauge was told to me by a friend who at one point had a crack habit and used said items to smoke crack and said it was a well known item to use for such a purpose.
- tomerv 5y agoYour original comment makes it sound like the main purpose of the small spoon is for cocaine - "Turns out it was for coke". But it's not "for coke", it's for stirring your coffee, and it's just that cocaine users found an alternative use for it. The article makes this pretty clear.
- marzell 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_rose https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_rose
- tomerv 5y agoOkay, you convinced me about that one (I haven't heard about this love rose thing before, and I don't live in the US). But my point about the stirrers still stands. I also think that the cheap socks are just that. But maybe they're popular due to their additional unintended use.
- simtel20 5y agoThe size of the clientele for many of these things probably would have been much smaller without the illicit uses, and they probably were created without illicit motives. Once there is demand, however, the further use was probably quantifiable as legit vs. off-brand use and even if one maker of glass tubes (for e.g.) stops because they're useful as rock pipes of some kind, someone else would be happy to pick up the slack.
- gaoryrt 5y agoNo offence, but what's the additional unintended use of cheap socks?
- jccalhoun 5y agothanks for the link. I have seen full sized roses in plastic tubes at gas stations and I was trying to figure out how those could be used for drugs. These little ones make more sense.
- hinkley 5y agoI think I was 15 when I called bullshit on that coffee spoon. I didn't understand what was going on exactly, but part of me knew that was a stupid size for coffee. I may have even joked about it being for cocaine, but I don't think I was serious about that. Nobody where I lived used cocaine, right? Right?
- beenBoutIT 5y agoThat ugly disposable McDonald's branded spoon doesn't strike me as something that 70s-80s era women would view as being "cool" or "hip". I really doubt a guy like Burt Reynolds would spend a few grand on a small amount of blow and then cheap out on the spoon.
- bigiain 5y agohttps://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/27499971.html https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/27499971.html They steal spark plugs for the ceramic parts too...
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoWorked 3rd shift for a gas station for a year and a half. Seedy elements would come in and ask for the glass roses regularly, but we didn't sell them because they were known paraphernalia.
- ThinkingGuy 5y agoEvery once in a while, even urban legends can turn out to be true: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stirring-response/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stirring-response/
- astura 5y agoThat link actually throughly refutes what the OP claimed. They claimed that drug paraphernalia was being sold as "coffee stirrers" (wink, wink) that nobody would actually use for coffee. That link says people were using actual coffee stirrers to also snort cocaine. Their original intended use was as coffee stirrers, not drug paraphernalia. There's a gigantic difference.
- SamBam 5y agoIndeed, and for all the people scoffing at how they can't possibly be coffee stirrers, most coffee shops nowadays give you tiny plastic or wooden twigs, which are far less effective at actually stirring, and yet still get the job done ok. A small spoon at the end of a modern stirrer would be much more effective, yet I guess people would accuse them of selling drug paraphernalia.
- abecedarius 5y agoI can remember the decent stirrers and always wondered why it's lousy ones everywhere now. Sheesh.
- pessimizer 5y agoNo, there's an absurdly minor difference. Plenty of "coffee stirrers" were intentionally manufactured as coke spoons, and plenty of earnest coffee stirrers were used instead as coke spoons. McDonald's was obviously not intentionally trying to manufacture coke spooks for absolutely no conceivable gain, but I bet their packaging designers looked at a lot of random coffee stirrers and tried to make one that looked like the fanciest of those.