Police Department Offers to Test Meth for 'Deadly Gluten'

The city of Niceville, Florida is the site of the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival and is home to roughly 12,000 people—give or take a few. It sounds like, well, a pretty nice place. Even the cops in Niceville seem to have a sense of humor--which is the only way to explain an unusual post that appeared recently on the Niceville Police Department's Facebook page:

Someone had better alert Walter White that things have changed in the meth game since Breaking Bad went off the air. Gluten in meth? What the hell are they talking about?, you may be asking yourself.

Police Chief David Popwell told MUNCHIES the idea for the posting came from a police department in California: "A bunch of police departments have been doing these sorts of posts for a couple years now. We noticed one post from a California department that recently showed up, so we contacted them and asked if we could post it on our webpage. The said sure, so that's what we did." Popwell added, "We thought it was a funny thing to do and we hoped it would stimulate conversation."

When asked if anybody had actually taken up the offer for free testing, Popwell told us, "No, no. Nobody's actually come in yet. We've had a lot of people saying, 'I don't use meth, but I use marijuana—can I get that tested instead?' We tell them that we do those tests on Tuesdays and Thursdays." Popwell told MUNCHIES that if someone actually did come in for the test, "We would have a discussion. Obviously, they would probably be high if they actually came in, so we would have a short discussion about the problems of carrying around meth."

Niceville Police Department later posted the following warning to those who make threats against the department as a result of their meth-testing post:

Does this recent post mean that the original post has gone terribly awry and the people of Niceville and elsewhere have been commenting in ways that are less than—nice? Popwell told MUNCHIES that the response had been overwhelmingly positive and that they had only received "one or two inappropriate comments."

So far, the police department has received almost 4,000 comments to their original post and more than 1,000 likes. A glance through the comments reveals that the police began by engaging with commenters—adding humorous quips like, "Well, we are [nice] in Niceville"—but eventually stopped commenting back.

In an era of increasingly fraught racial tension over systematic police abuse, will a dad joke mocking gluten-free diets be enough to bridge the divide and change minds? Probably not, but we'll just have to wait and see.