Are Kids Really Huffing Burning Wheelie Bins Again?

(Top photo: VICE)

The kids are on drugs, guys. I'm sorry to have to report that, but I think it's only right you know. The children are the future, you see, and if the human race is going to make it we need to get our weans, bairns, ankle biters and tadpoles off the hard stuff and into the textbooks.

However, it looks like that's going to be tricky, as it would seem that children are now taking their lust for narcotics to extreme lengths. Yesterday, The Hartlepool Mail got word that children are getting their rocks off by huffing the acrid smoke coming off of on-fire bins. They're setting the bins alight, sticking their tiny stupid heads in the lids, taking a deep breath of the potentially fatal burning plastic fumes and riding that motherfucking wave!

Or so says Mark Hall of bin and waste management website businesswaste.co.uk, speaking to the Hartlepool Mail: "We've seen reports from Wolverhampton, Hull, Glasgow and Swindon over recent weeks, and they're all the same. Idiots stealing wheeled bins from outside homes and businesses, taking them to waste ground or parks, and torching them for whatever kicks they can derive. While some of them could just be arson, others include quotes from police officers who acknowledge that they're doing it for weird drug-related kicks."

The truth is that we here at VICE are no strangers to the concept of huffing a burning bin. Ten years ago, in 2007, when life for me was about washing a cold Ginsters slice down with a Red Bull at lunchtime and smoking roaches I'd found in the pocket of my brother's coat, VICE magazine was way ahead of the curve. In a piece entitled "Barnsley Calling", one of our interns at the time set fire to a wheelie bin and had a big bang on it to see what would happen. We did this because of rumours that kids in Blackburn were doing the same, while kids in Glasgow were apparently hotboxing melted phone boxes using a lighter and an aerosol. The results were predictable – slumped vomiting and sadness.

Here, take a look for yourselves:

But wait a second here. Something about this doesn't quite add up. Why is a ten-year-old, most likely fake story about evil children burning bins and getting fucked up from them coming back around? Is there any real way to corroborate this horrendous story of misspent youth? Is this really happening?

To find out I called up drugs charities in Wolverhampton, Hull, Glasgow and Swindon, and no one in any of those places had heard anything about it. Hull's Public Health department had heard about a few bins being torched, but nothing about anyone huffing the noxious fumes out of them.

So where was Mr Hall getting his information from? "Drivers," he told me, "so you have to take it with a pinch of salt." Hall said that the reports he'd received were second-hand, and that all he'd heard of was a few bins being set alight – which, a few months ago, he said, would be virtually unheard of.

But the logistics of engulfing a wheelie bin – or any other kind of industrial waste receptacle, for that matter – in flames purely for the sick, sick high simply doesn't make sense. This isn't like lighting a delicious doobie with a clipper – this takes work; it takes effort.

Many times over in the past we have seen rumours abound of children trying to get high in bizarre ways. Remember jenkem (or "butthash"), the fermented sewage drug? Or choking your mates into a head rush? Maybe they're real, maybe they're not, but I think we can all agree – like the bin sniffing – they are supremely fucking stupid.

"It's really dangerous. You could easily die," says Mark. He's right, too.

Perhaps recirculating this probably erroneous news story is the real danger of the so-called "fake news". Forget Trump, forget May, forget what you thought you knew about the media. Instead of reporting the realities of the bin fire high, the MSM is promoting hearsay and potentially opening children up to the mere idea of inhaling bin smoke. Where their innocent little eyes once would have seen the family wheelie, now they see a giant anthropomorphic bong, a fresh bowl loaded up, with a big grin on its face.

"Come here, dude. Light me up, cuz. Suck my acrid bin smoke and come to crazy town!" it screams. What a sick world we live in.

@joe_bish

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