Bummer, Dude
Good Idea: Baking cookies for your co-op. Better Idea: Baking special cookies for your co-op. Bad Idea: Getting everybody sick.
Various Bay Area news outlets (except, of course, the Daily Cal) are reporting that as many as thirty students became sick after the cookies were served at the Cloyne Co-Op Wednesday night, and at least twelve were taken to the hospital.
The Chronicle (in addition to having a Daily Cal-esque headline) has a quote from Berkeley PD, stating that it is suspected that these cookies may have been tainted with other drugs. That would make a certain amount of sense, especially given the amount of marijuana required to make cookies for over thirty people as well as the amount needed to make all of them sick. (At least, that’s what I’ve heard… I don’t know much about the stuff…)
On the plus side, at least campus news on alcohol has been kept to a minimum this semester. It just goes to show, try to educate students on being safer, and they’ll just find better and funnier ways to be stupid.
I saw the police cars there, it was quite the hullaballoo last night. Here’s my theory (and it’s right, because it’s MY theory): Cloyne is fucking filthy and it’s not unlikely that the eggs or butter used to make the special cookies was long-expired, causing everyone to get food poisoning. The sickness had nothing to do with the marijuana in the cookies. Baking pot cookies for your whole co op is in fact a GREAT idea. You just shouldn’t do it with ingredients that get people sick.
First of all, if these cookies just had marijuana there is no way that any real harm could come to any consumant of the aforementioned treats. Marijuana has no known LD-50 and in 5000 years of recorded use of the plant not ONE fatal overdose has been recorded. Also, “laced weed” is largely an urban legend. Why would any dealer knowingly cut down pot - one of the cheapest and most accessible psychoactive drugs in the universe - with anything else (when that something else is bound to be more costly and harder to find than pot)? The odds that these were heroin cookies or some other such absurd thing are astronomically low. The odds that they weren’t thoroughly baked and everyone got sick from eating raw eggs - pretty good.
This is not a criminal matter or a drug matter, it’s a call for that co op to do a mandatory lecture on kitchen cleanliness and safety. Trust me: I’ve probably eaten more pot food than the average Cal sorority girl has eaten regular food.
Comment by Annonymous — September 7, 2006 @ 11:04 am
When I was there for a punk show, the above description was somewhat valid. It seems like co-op cleanliness varies due to presence or absence of key people who display leadership in either getting the other people to clean, or doing huge amounts of cleaning by themselves. I also found a good sized bag of meth powder just sitting there on a table, so I gave it to a straightedger, who gave it to someone else. One of their problems is that a lot of outsiders including homeless use the house as a community center. I would be wary of theft myself.
Comment by anon — September 7, 2006 @ 12:19 pm
what exactly would be the symptoms of eating something cooked with bad eggs or butter? I would imagine that your stomach would hurt and you would be puking. But would that make your heart race? I don’t know, but I’m a little suspicious that spoiled butter would cause a racing heartbeat?
Comment by Berkeley Mountain Lion Patrol — September 7, 2006 @ 12:59 pm
One of the symptoms was “a feeling of doom,” so I imagine that the pot didn’t help matters when it came to self-diagnosis.
Comment by Beetle — September 7, 2006 @ 2:42 pm
Imagine what it would be like to get food poisoning while being very high on weed? I dont know (no seriously, no innuendo, i really don’t know) what its like to be high, but all my friends say you can get really paranoid. If you are sick from bad eggs, wouldn’t the psychological changes intensify (especially the paranoia)?
Just a wild-ass non-medically-informed non-drug-experienced guess.
Comment by Eddy Crochetiere — September 7, 2006 @ 2:45 pm
Farked.
Comment by Beetle — September 7, 2006 @ 3:34 pm
Look - this is news in Scotland. I bet they know about William Hung over there too.
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=1327332006
Comment by ESS — September 7, 2006 @ 6:26 pm
It was almost certainly cut with shrooms - that’d have all of the effects listed.
Comment by Spanky McCrackers — September 7, 2006 @ 6:30 pm
BTW: There’s rampant growing in the co-ops of both shrooms and marijuana, so both are in large supply at negligible prices.
Comment by Spanky McCrackers — September 7, 2006 @ 6:31 pm
We even got a repeat on Fark. On the same day.
Comment by Beetle — September 7, 2006 @ 7:21 pm
well, this is doing wonders for the school’s reputation.
does berkeley ever have any good news?
Comment by Anonymous — September 7, 2006 @ 9:15 pm
the school’s reputation? you gotta be kiddin me.
this wouldn’t be news if it were UCSC…so we got some catchin up to do.
Comment by you know it! — September 7, 2006 @ 11:17 pm
Unless Cloyne starts their parties in the mid-morning there’s no way this is food poisoning, that takes 8-12 hours to manifest. I’m betting shrooms.
Comment by captain duh — September 8, 2006 @ 5:28 am
finally the co-ops get a bad rep. im sick of the media and university constantly picking on the greek community.
Comment by Anonymous — September 8, 2006 @ 7:41 am
Yeah, it’s about time they start constantly picking on someone else!
Comment by Anonymously Smarter — September 8, 2006 @ 9:25 am
These anonybots are perfect examples of why undergraduate campus life is so pathetic and weak. The correct response here would be for people to show some solidarity between co-ops and the greek houses and fight back against the university when it tries to intervene or usurp control over student autonomy and community. This loser defeatist attitude of “one side gets screwed” so now we should cheer for everybody to get screwed just leads to a descending spiral of lameass wienerism.
Comment by mano — September 8, 2006 @ 1:06 pm
whatever mano. when there is negative news about the Greek community, do you post supportive messages and “show solidarity” with them? No, you come to calstuff to rip on the greeks and trash their reputation. but when it’s the drug addled co-op leftists and their ilks, you expect the greeks to rally behind them. hypocrite.
Comment by chet (CEO and virgin) — September 8, 2006 @ 2:22 pm
I thought it was clear that my post was drenching with sarcasm? *shrug*
Comment by Anonymously Smarter — September 8, 2006 @ 3:12 pm
work on your sarcasm
Comment by Anonymous — September 8, 2006 @ 6:07 pm
chet, you tube-fed retard, “ilks” is not a word.
also, given that you dont read, and can barely speak without choking on saliva, this may be pretty hard for you to do, but please, by all means, provide a link to a post by me in which I “trash” greeks?
Comment by mano — September 8, 2006 @ 11:34 pm
The Berkeley police are known to look down on the UCPD as less skilled and professional. The UCPD don’t really have a lot to on campus except eject homeless people and respond to theft and write reports on it. You can pretty much guarantee that they would like to take the opportunity to engage in more party patrol stuff just because it would make life more exciting. And the way that the press associated this with the killed student last week, would add to the expectation of more monitoring.
Comment by ESS — September 9, 2006 @ 7:54 pm
an honest note from an outsider: it’s not as much as mano trashing the reputation of the greek community, but (some members/groups) of the greek community trash it themselves. ~ then again, i haven’t not read many of mano’s notes on the greek community.
Comment by Anonymous — September 10, 2006 @ 12:31 am
oh excuse me, i meant “i have not read mano’s notes on the greek community.”
Comment by Anonymous — September 10, 2006 @ 12:33 am
Hahaha, one should read the most recent Chronicle for accurate information about this incident instead of speculating on the cleanliness of Cloyne’s kitchen.
The kitchen at Cloyne is considered to be a commercial kitchen and is held to the same standards as other commercial kitchens (such as restaurants) by Berkeley’s department of Health and Safety. This might make you think twice about eating anywhere in Berkeley outside of your own kitchen.
Cloyne is a community center for the homeless? Now that’s comedy. If you think so do an experiment. Come to Cloyne, first try to get in, then counts the seconds until someone asks you whom you are with and then promptly tells you to hit the road.
Also I personally worked with Henry Lee, the SF Chronicle writer, who covered this story. He told me that he when he was a student here, he wrote for the Daily Cal.
Comment by Nathan — September 10, 2006 @ 5:22 pm