![]() ![]() Wet can also cause psychotic episodes and brain damage. The buzz is intense.I t can leave users numb for eight hours, in a hallucinatory state, or make them feel euphoric and powerful. The smell is awful, an acidic reek of ether-of which there is plenty-that sears the mouth and lungs. The drug is aptly named: A user soaks a joint or cigarette in the fluid and then smokes it. ![]() ![]() Mike is referring to his fascination with what may be the strangest high to seep from the fanciful mind of American drug culture.Wet is a caustic liquid that contains, among other toxic chemicals, formaldehyde, the active ingredient in embalming fluid. “As long as I don’t see it, I don’t want it,” he says, sliding his wary eyes over the Taco Cabana where several street kids loiter on cement picnic tables. Now, despite a chronic pot habit, he hopes to become a nurse.Y et even as he extols the virtues of relative sobriety (he recently got his GED), Mike wouldn’t mind getting “wet” again. It’s a slow day in the Montrose, as the area is known, and Mike, wrapped in a wool coat against the January cold, has nothing but time to kill.įor six months, Mike has avoided crack and heroin, the hard stuff that used to chew up his life. To survive, they panhandle, sell drugs, roll drunks, or hustle their young bodies to leering chicken hawks in SUVs before hunkering down in a supermarket bathroom or heading back home to the local Covenant House. Mike, 20, is a street kid, one of dozens who troll this peculiar strip of galleries, gay bars, upscale cafés, and porn shops. MIKE MCARDLE PROWLS THE GRUBBY CORNER OF WESTHEIMER AND MONTROSE, a grim intersection just two miles from the pristine skyscrapers of downtown Houston, trying to score a four-dollar joint. MAY 2020 Photo by Reuben Cox The latest drug burning through America is the lethal mix of dope and embalming fluid, but this ghastly high turns out to be a fresh mask for a hideously familiar face. ![]()
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