An April Fool’s Day hoax saying kids are “smoking bed bugs” to get high and has gone viral this week.
The hoax is a YouTube video created by pranksters, who altered a KNXV-TV video from 2013 about smoking butane-extracted hash oil. The original report had nothing to do with bedbugs, and the pranksters just used and altered the footage to make it look like people are smoking bedbugs. The original video and report can be seen here.
An accompanying post about smoking bedbugs reads: “In their latest effort to find a cheap high that doesn’t require the purchase of any actual drugs, teens have discovered a way to smoke bed bugs. Yes, BED BUGS. The things that normal people hate even thinking about. The little critters that plague hotels and give guests nasty rashes. Yes, those very same bed bugs.”
It adds: “Apparently, the insects contain a hallucinogenic substance within them, except it’s impossible to isolate it, so the bugs have to be caught, killed and crushed into a powder, which is then either smoked or, perhaps even worse and more disgusting, injected. How did they even think of this?!”
According to hoax-debunking website Snopes, the whole thing is an April Fool’s Day hoax.
“However, this story was just a hoax, an April Fool’s Day prank based on an altered version of a real KNXV-TV report from several months earlier on the dangers of ‘dabbing’ (i.e., inhaling butane-extracted hash oil, also known as BHO),” the website says.
