Ever heard of ‘Fed Dope’? Back in the day it was the putrid concoction hawked and peddled by the rats and snitches of Larimer County’s drug task force; the informants, aptly referred to by this humble narrator as the Fort Collins Subversive Operations Unit and they strutted about like sweaty, greasy peacocks in custom-tailored rat jackets, peddling this noxious garbage at prices so phenomenal it’d make a gambler choke on his whiskey…
This shit was infamous. Take a hit and your skin would feel like it was caught in a furnace, scaling and flaking away like the past you can’t escape, turning delicate flesh into a parched desert.. Mainlining it and your veins turned to stone and your eyes, your eyes would crust over like a forgotten grave in a N’Orleans alley…. you’d be walkin’ blind for days.
Meanwhile, the rat-pack slurped down the sweet nectar of the real biker criddle flowing from Limon all while blissfully pocketing easy-greezy payroll checks from their Wranglers in the Sheriff’s department.. Talk about a double life, they were living it large soaking up the spoils while dragging the rest of us down into cancer wards.
To the folks like myself cutting teeth as desk clerks and night owls in the hotel district, the ones keeping their eyes peeled on this circle of vultures, we caught a scent. They had another codeword for fed-dope, a siren song for the marks: ‘Fire.’ Every time some lowlife tried to hawk a bag of ‘FIRE’ you could bet your ass t’was a bag full of smart dust mixed with either Raid bug spray scraped off a screen and sold as gold, or some racket called MSM (myzm.)
If you were sap enough to swallow the hook, you’d spend your nights itchin’ and a’ scratchin to high heaven, blind as a bat while blowing up their lines for a refund while they were tucked away in the Hilton getting high on the real stuff and laughing at how easy it was to bleed you dry. Now, I weren’t in the inner circle so myzm is just another ghost story to me but rumors o’plenty whispered around the courtyards had it as horse pills, or maybe some cheap filler scraped from a burlap sack of chicken feed. I can say for certain that pulling a hit from a glass rose left you chokin’ and wheezin’ like a lymphoma patient on his death bed as your dope pipe turned as black and hard as midnight coal.