Sharkface – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.
Did you see “Cocaine Bear?” I didn’t. I think you’d have to be on cocaine to enjoy that. I don’t know; I do coke. But I do movies. Just not that one. But its unlikely success has spawned a spinner called, get this, “Cocaine Shark.” And with 3,486 animals large enough to do coke (I made that up) there are going to be “Cocaine” movies long after we’ve evolved to tolerate it the way we tolerate gas station coffee.
But “Cocaine Shark.” This was inspired by true events. Well, probably not; AI probably spit that out. I’m sure they’re just thinking of any scary animal and feeding it coke. But there are cocaine sharks. Off the Brazilian coast, the sharpnosed sharks have been tested, and the cocaine levels in their muscles and tissues were 100 times what they would expect, which begs the question of how much cocaine they had expected to find. What’s 100 times of “none”?
They don’t really know why. The obvious answer is drug dealers dumping bales of cocaine into the Brazilian coast, which makes sense, but also makes Brazilian smugglers terrible at loss prevention. Yeah, I know, they don’t give a sh*t about losing some bales. So you got sharks eating bales. But the other explanation is that it’s going into he water from the waste runoff, and the cocaine is from, well, illegal sites, but also from human waste.
How much coke do you have to be doing to get the sharks high? A lot. Brazilians must be very happy, and very productive. But this makes me think of things I’ve read about the levels of antidepressants in the U.S. water supply from people flushing their pills down the drain. This kind of explains the turtle on the Watervliet shore of the Hudson that had Grateful Dead on some dollar store headphones and a doobie made out of a paper milk club card. Happy. Zoloft.
I make sure to eat all my meds. And any other meds I see lying around. I’m “Pharma Liam.”
