I Bought and Tested a Bunch of Gas Station Drugs With Names Like "Tweaker"
Gas stations are the new drug dealers
In our teens and twenties, my friends and I took our fair share of sketchy gas station drugs. We particularly enjoyed ephedrine, small white pills marketed as asthma medication — except they were sold in bulk right by the cashier, and everyone knew they were actually cheap speed.
Structurally similar to amphetamine, ephedrine gave us bursts of nervous energy for hours at a time. We once drove overnight from Birmingham to St. Louis on the stuff, before I was hit by a wave of nausea. One of my friends had a seizure at a bar one time, after taking too many of the pills.
Ephedrine is now scheduled, but these days gas stations all over the country are veritable pharmacopeias of powerful and dangerous depressants and stimulants, ranging from a drug known as “gas station heroin” to an energy drink called “Tweaker.”
Some of these drugs are obviously intended for recreational use, while others purport to have health benefits. Some actually do have health benefits when taken properly, but doing so is nearly impossible without proper medical advice, the kind not likely to be given by the pimply teenager behind the counter.
How can these products be legal? Well, many actually aren’t. They often contain a completely different set of chemicals than what’s listed on their packaging. The FDA doesn’t regulate them; their contents have zero oversight. As a result almost no one knows what’s actually in them, least of all the consumers.
And so, I decided to test some myself. To collect samples, I visited a few St. Louis-area gas stations, including QuikTrip, the ubiquitous Midwestern chain perhaps best known for having its Ferguson store burned down following Michael Brown’s killing in 2014.
I walked in and bought five products off of the shelves, chosen because they piqued my curiosity. I didn’t see some of the better-known gas station drugs, such as tianeptine (also known as “gas station heroin”), or whippets, aka nitrous oxide. (Check out this gas station display of the stuff, photographed by a Marginal Revolution reader.)
But I did buy some goofy and disturbing products, which I then brought to my buddy Sarah Riley’s lab in North St. Louis County for testing.
Here’s what we found.
Tweaker (watermelon flavor)
Cost: 99 cents for 2 fluid ounces
Purported ingredients: