Are teenage ravers getting high on their own feces?

That's what officials at one Montreal school board believes. These paranoid bureaucrats have sent out letters warning parents about the dangers of raving, and tucked beneath the boiler plate fear mongering about date rape and death by dehydration is an unusual warning against the Zambian drug known as jemken. Officials believe that jemken use is endemic in the Montreal rave scene, which should baffle anyone who has ever went to a party in the city.

Jemken makes meth look high class. Sniffing glue and huffing exhaust pipes are caviar compared to this toxic drug that was born in the slums of Lukasa, where children trapped in world of poverty spend their free time at the sewage ponds, where they prepare jemken. Jemken is done by filling bottles with human waste, leaving just enough room at the top of the bottle for methane to rise while its putrid innards ferment. It takes about a week before a bottle of jemken is ready to be consumed, and the high lasts around an hour.

The drug gained notoriety outside of Lukasa when news outlets like the BBC began covering its existence in the mid nineties. Soon, children all over the world were experimenting with this sludge budge. A series of threads on 4chan show teenagers making it and huffing it, scare stories about its abuse have popped up all over North America, with police departments warning that jemken is a gateway drug that will lead to more serious abuse if it isn't curtailed. Some cities, after learning about jemken's existence, began enacting more stringent controls over sewage facilities to make sure no one is going around stealing crap and turning it into jemken.

Bureaucrats and politicians constantly overstate the dangers of drug abuse to the point of absurdity, and drugs like jemken help emphasize this. The youth of North America are not huffing bottles of their own shit, and ravers in Montreal are not taking jemken at parties. In fact, if drug dealers were to start selling jemken at raves, they'd probably start losing business. Who in their right mind wants to buy drugs from someone who carries a bag full of shit with them wherever they go?

Jemken does exist, but it's uncommon in North America, and even if it were common, the only real danger it poses is to human dignity.