Talk:Wasp dope

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Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs (defunct)

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Removed the congressional hearings... wanted to add some additional info on why I did that doesn't belong in the article

Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Aside from the fact that the hearing absolutely didn't acknowledge that this was happening they sort of did the opposite and told him he was full of it (it would taste far too foul just based on the smell) and moved right past his shadow-of-youtube-influencers-to-come levels of stupidity about the world (he also mentioned that they sprayed parsley with "skyrocket fuel" directly after the RAID thing... mmmm, hydrazine... or maybe it was one of the finer vintages of ammonium perchlorate based composite resin fuel cured onto the parsley, or he lucked out and found some of the 70/30 KClO4 / asphaltum JATO fuels as "tar" PCP. Any are just as stupid and unlikely).

Since I figured somebody would probably re-read that ref I remove and come to the wrong conclusion a second time, I tried to hunt down a vintage can of the actual bug spray and found one on ebay. It's from the late 60s, but that could fit easily even if they changed the formula, small town hardware stores often have 10 year old spray cans of various low-selling items laying around... off-brand bug sprays, ugly spraypaint colors, etc.

While it's fairly plausible that most healthy people could get away with huffing a low-mammalian-activity insecticide like one of the pyrethrins (I don't buy that it produces any sort of desirable buzz though), RAID back then had a lot worse things in it... I found on that label:

Dieldrin This was the main ingredient in the older RAID formulation at 0.5% total, which is a quite high concentration for an insecticide in a spray. This was one of the more toxic of the old chlorinated insecticides that were banned from use years ago in most countries. Mirex and dechlorane aren't really close and they caused all kinds of issues while they were around. It isn't quite as as toxic as parathion and aldicarb which were also around in that era, but not much is, and I suspect attempting to get high off of it would probably have been lethal. The melting point is far too high to easily vaporize it, though. The next two ingredients were fairly non-volatile flammable liquids (permethrin synergists), then finally permethrins. Even if people do the stuff as a drug now, which I'm still not super convinced about, nobody would have been doing it back then.

A Shortfall Of Gravitas (talk) 07:48, 26 March 2026 (UTC)Reply