What to do with too much leftover opium?
That was the problem reported to me by a Local Housewife. Here's what happened.
Where It Came From
The Local Housewife's two kids had their wisdom teeth extracted. One received 20 Percocets. The other 20 Vicodin.
That's about 20x the amount of drugs I received when I had my wisdom teeth extracted.
Side story: when I was a kid, my orthodontist, Jake Aldrich, was an innovator. He figured that if my primary teeth were pulled prematurely, in scheduled phases, my secondary teeth would grow in straight — without the braces my sisters had enjoyed.
So I was sedated — to sleep — several times during my youth for the extraction of primary teeth.
Once I woke up with a dusty footprint on my chest.
But this story isn't about that.
Anyway, Local Housewife's kids received enough painkillers that the wisdom teeth could have been extraced through their cheeks.
What To Do With The Drugs?
So what do you do with all the leftover drugs?
She could have sold them on the street for hundreds of dollars. But she's not that enterprising. Plus, she doesn't know the right people. (Or, perhaps, she knows the right people, but doesn't know which ones ache for opiates.)
And everyone knows not to flush them down the toilet because there are Wild Reports On The Interwebs about how that has increased the pharmaceutical quality of our drinking water. I don't believe those tales, but I am strangely addicted to our water. I'm always wondering, where is the next one coming from?
The most responsible idea would be to take them to the hospital on Bring Us Your Drugs Day, or Bring Your Drugs To Work Day, or whatever it's called when you can drive by the hospital and throw your drugs at their front door.
But that seemed dangerous. After all, drugs is drugs and even hospital personnel could easily resell the drugs in their own neighborhoods.
Anyway, Local Housewife had a better idea.
Smash the pills and throw them away.
So she put them in a sandwich bag and hit the bag repeatedly with a hammer, until the pills were pulvarized.
But, looking at the Baggie with powdered opium in it, Local Housewife thought, "This is a Baggie with powdered opium." As a trained medical professional, she realized, "That's just another drug delivery form."
Fear is a powerful motivator in the suburbs.
Local Housewife combined the Evil with the greatest grossness she could find: collected kitchen grease.
She placed the mess in the garbage bin in the alley. For good measure, she placed the dog's earth soil on it. "Very nice," thought Local Housewife. "No fool would mess with that."
Enter The Groundhog
All summer, her modest crops have been devastated by a groundhog or woodchuck or whatever is grey and moves surprisingly fast across the alley though it appears to be nothing more than a furry toaster oven.
But, man, that thing loves tomatoes and lettuce and beans. And not just any tomatoes and lettuce and beans. This thing loves the tomatoes and lettuce and beans that were meant for Local Househusband.
This summer, he got nothing.
So there is some bitterness about the Groundhog.
What Happened
The next morning after Local Housewife corked the trash, the can was found turned over in the alley. Some creature had gone to the exact bag — gee, was it the meat grease? — and clawed into the bag.
Somewhere, deep in the suburban underbrush, there is a creature who is feeling very mellow (and more constipated than usual) — and who is deeply disappointed by all the other trash since then up and down the alley.
Nothing since that morning has delivered the same buzz.