They're mad because he didn't share.

I know a whole lot of people who are good cooks and nearly all of them are better cooks when they're stoned. The best cooks I've known were all part time dealers.

Huh. I would not have thought that. Now I'm all curious to be served by a toked-up chef.

Go to a restaurant, chances are you will be.

I cooked professionally for many years in some very high-end places, and I can confirm this. Not everyone smokes on the job, but some do. Despite the stereotypes, some people just don't really get addled and foggy when they smoke, or if they do a little caffeine (or other stimulant) is enough to snap em out of it. And the cooks who do smoke recreationally far, far outnumber the ones who do not.

I actually got to smoke up with Daniel Boulud one evening after a demo he did at a place where I worked. He had a lot of great stories. I've also worked with a few people who worked under Emeril (back when he was still working restaurants, rather than owning them) and they independently mentioned that he smokes a TON of weed.

Yeah most cooks are high. When I did prep and dishwashed we'd get a few shift shots of the liquor of our choice and get high in the alleyway. But when I was a server I couldn't handle it so I quit smoking on the job. Too many people, that sort of shit.

This thread is very enlightening for me. I only smoked weed a few times, and I ended up just sorta paranoid. So, y'know--don't smoke it, don't hang around with folks that do. Not that I *wouldn't* hang out with them, just that I work from home and have no friends.

I was going to say a lot of places they might be doing coke or possible crack and/or heroin (I'm not going to name names but I can say with 100% confidence based on reports from people who work/have worked there that at least one very popular, somewhat fancy place in New Hampshire is absolutely loaded with all three) but even in those cases, chances are they're smoking weed also.

Ice cream shops seem to be the most drug addled, and coffee shops are often pretty amazing, too. Years ago I dated someone who used to work at the Starbucks in the Copley Plaza mall in Boston. They actually had a communal plate of speed on the manager's desk, and said manager (who she was friends with) and at least one assistant manager would get high and leave their dicks out under their aprons pretty much all the time. The manager (who I knew a bit too) usually worked the register and he had a thing for getting hit, so he apparently had trouble sometimes because the cash drawer would hit him in the dick and it would give him a boner.

Food service!

I'm not sure anymore, but I'm pretty sure he was also a PoE Red fan, not sure if he posted and I haven't seen or spoken to him in over a decade so I'm not expecting to find out any time soon but on the of chance he comes here, HI DAVE!

Dave's not here man

I can't speak for cooks getting high, but I worked at a fast food place back in highschool, and our cooks used to sell drugs through the drive-thru window. Two cheeseburgers with a side of blow.

I've never done any drugs, not even weed. I feel like I'm missing out.

Harder drugs are definitely widespread, but not nearly as much as weed. Since they can't really function without the drugs, people addicted to the hard stuff tend to be much less reliable, and reliability (showing up ready to work, every shift) is one of the most important traits for anyone in a kitchen, so they don't usually last that long.

On the other hand, if someone who smokes weed every day doesn't have weed for a bit, then worse case scenario they are a little crankier/sweatier than usual. It's like that scene in Half Baked where Dave Chappelle is at the "Rehab" meeting and Bob Saget's coke addict character goes off on him ("You ever suck some dick for marijuana?!")

Anthony Bourdain's memoir Kitchen Confidential has lots of examples of the drug-induced depravity that is extremely common in kitchens in any major city, but I'll go ahead and share another (wow this got long, fast!) anecdote from my career:

I worked for a few years at a relatively short-lived restaurant on the Chicago loop that was gigantic and extremely well-funded, but a total clusterfuck from day one. The kitchen was a city block long, and we had four huge dining rooms that altogether could easily host banquets for 1000 people (which we regularly did).

The owner was extremely wealthy from his other business, and he basically opened the entire restaurant to appease his girlfriend, who had worked in restaurants for many years as a front-of-house person. She was the GM and hired her son, who had just graduated culinary school, as the executive chef of the entire huge operation, and he in turn hired his smoking hot debutante girlfriend as the head hostess, as well as mother and son hiring about a dozen other assistant managers and sous-chefs-of-this-or-that. At one point we had about .5 million in salary worth of managers and people with 'chef' in their title.

In addition to being completely in over his head, the son was also addicted to cocaine. To his credit he held it together as best he could, but things started to get more and more shaky.

Late one afternoon I needed the chef to sign off on something, but he was nowhere to be found in the kitchen. I started wandering around the restaurant, and I finally found him in one of the back halls we rarely used, lying right in the middle of the giant room, on the floor on his back, napping. When I woke him, he took a key bump right there in front of me. I smoked weed, but at that point I had never really done coke before, so I was mildly horrified.

Later, we hired this guy Eric. I never saw Eric cook very much, but he worked nights, and I worked days so I never really thought much of it. Then I worked a few doubles, and I found out that Eric barely cooked at all. He was on staff, but pretty much his whole purpose was to come in towards the beginning of a dinner shift, then go out on the clock, sometimes more than once, to score cocaine for the chef and the other people in the restaurant who used. Later I realized there had been a whole series of guys who had this role, but I guess they weren't okay with it or had shitty connections so they only lasted a couple weeks each.

It all ended pretty spectacularly, with a few dinner shifts in a row and then a big banquet that turned into total shit shows. The girlfriend GM stepped down, her son stepped down to go into rehab, and the rich owner ended up cleaning house and hiring this veteran exec chef to stop the place hemorrhaging money.

I stayed on (even got a promotion!), because while this was the first place that I tried cocaine, I wasn't really part of the chef's 'in-crowd' so I thankfully never had it enough to get addicted. Plus the few times I tried it there were enough to scare the shit out of me, and make me realize that this was an extremely powerful drug for which I needed unbreakable rules if I was going to ever use it again. The place closed down about a year later, but I was long gone by then and working at a place with better food, people, and infrastructure.

EvilHomer, not even alcohol?

A little alcohol, but barely any if I'm being honest; I'll take a shot or two of Scotch now and then, but that's about it. I've been drunk maybe once in my entire life, and I've never finished so much as a single beer in any given sitting. Once every six months or so, I might buy some booze for the house, but it always winds up either getting drunk by my friends when they come over, or being used for cooking.

The weird part is, I don't really have any strong moral reservations one way or another. I don't have any religious hangups, I hate the straightedge movement, and I've got a frighteningly liberal attitude towards drug use in general, but for whatever reason I just never get into it.

Yes. Weed is rampant in the food service industry (all drugs to some extant but weed is just excepted).

Stories: I was working as a barista at a local coffee shop. I'm 19 and fucking stoked about working at this place. so it's my first day and I'm working with the head manager. During some down time we're both leaning against the counter and he's holding a little bottle and he gets all serious and says, "Did I tell you about the drug testing policy?" I go white (as I was a a massive stoner at the time) "...No. No you did not." to which he responded, "I'm just fucking with you man. Hell we'd all fail it."

So, about a year later this place opens up a satellite store on a nearby campus. and much to my chagrin I was tasked with opening this place up at 6 am with the owner of the entire operation. Who just happened to be a massive coke-head. He was literally notorious for it. So, one morning I'm getting over my hangover (I think I was finishing off a 12 pack a night at this point in time) and the owner is shakier and "going to the bathroom" more than usual and in walks the fucking president of the university (pretty big deal) starts up a conversation with the owner and not 30 seconds into the conversation, blood starts running out of his nose. Owner runs off mid sentance blood on his hands and I get to take the presidents order. The look of confusion crossed with horror on the guys face still always makes me smile.

I feel like I should note that on more than a couple of occasions I worked at that place so fuckered on pills I couldn't stand up. God I miss not going to college.

What's the point of all of this? If everybody who did drugs went on strike the entire food service industry would shut the fuck down.

Heh yeah the co-op I worked at was also a bodega, mostly weed and coke but also some other stuff like K flew in and out. The owners (besides the one in the basement) would come in about once a year, do a shit-ton of coke and run around the store trying to find the most expired thing in the store, closing it down and drinking and smoking inside. They instituted a mandatory rule that we showed midget porn on Tuesdays, and actually fired a guy for not having it on. The only time we had to fire someone due to drugs was because he was in a K-hole for the entire shift, and got halfway up the stairs with the bank bag before leaving it in plain sight on the stairs before going back down and snorting more K.

Anyway, my professors would come in all the time to buy mostly cigarettes, but one time Russ Feingold came in, also to buy cigarettes and say hi to me (his daughter went to the school and happened to be dating one of my housemates at the time so we were friends) and the owners were there, fucked the fuck up, running through store as usual with a 5th of whiskey. I was like "oh shit oh shit oh shit..." My co-worker was blasting G.G. Allin and pissing on the side of the building too. The owners were like "RUSS!" They high-fived and took off with Russ to the pub up the street. I'm not sure what the moral to that story is.

The moral of that story is Russ Feingold should have been our President.

I tried to write a long narrative of one amazing story that happened to a friend of mine but I couldn't do it justice, so the TL;DR is one of the guys from the kitchen snuck into the attic storage area after his shift to smoke crack and lost track of time, so he was still up there when the evening shift manager, who was not OK with that kind of stuff, came in. The guy panicked when he heard footsteps near the stairs and KNOCKED A HOLE THROUGH THE BATHROOM CEILING so he could make his escape. Said scape was successful and my friend, who had been working the whole time, got blamed. Not that he didn't do plenty of stuff himself that would have gotten him fired if he'd been caught, but he wasn't smoking crack and he definitely wasn't knocking holes in the building.

Evilhomer, drinking's overrated anyhow. I don't do it much myself.

Same with me, Homer, I was always around a real casual attitude about drinking and drugs, no strong emotions or attitudes from others around, so I think I wasn't affected much. Although, I did associate pot with bad teasing kids on my bus in junior high. I'd smell weed smoke on the bus, but realize later they probably weren't the ones being rowdy, they'd probably be sharing a puff and trying to hide it.

My parents didn't smoke anything, and rarely drank, I had some anti-drug education at school, I remember in Health getting a paper that described pills and what street names they had. I think the kids later on got the harder sell on anti-drugs though.

Boom

Coming mad way late to this story party, but ok.

1998 and working in the University of Washington dorms, food service (McMahon Hall, represent!). I worked the Sunday evening night shift, four until 11:30; very laid back, everybody was chilled out and just wanted fried foods so the menu was simple and they trusted student workers like me with cooking pizzas and working the fryers and things.

The crew was pretty regular and included some frat boys over 21 (I was a babyish 18) and we made a thing out of sharing a handle of gin, or tequila, or vodka over the course of the evening; we'd mix with the free soft drinks that we had as a work perk. Not a bottle mind, but a handle between about five of us.

The beautiful thing was, our 60ish manager was totally cool with it, cause we were in a good mood and she was down to party too. The frat boy who was our buyer was also coked up and I never tried the stuff because I was too afraid, quite frankly. That said, I probably smoked more weed in college than he did.

The target audience of a PSA is always organization that funded it and hired the company who made it.

Well it's kind of like those "over the limit under arrest" DUII commercials, where the guy looks and seems normal enough to drive but the car spills out gallons of beer or wine, etc. What I find weird is how the police are going to gage these situations. I don't drive, but most people I know who drive high are usually the most cautious people on the road, going 30 in a 35 mph zone, unlike drunk drivers, who consider themselves temporarily invincible: "there's no other cars around so fuck this stop sign whoops I hit a bicyclist."

I don't think it's a good idea to drive under any substance, even caffiene really, but is it going to get to the point where cops start noticing everyone not making the typical sober "California stop," cautiously looking in all directions for probably longer than most people, and pull them over assuming they're stoned?

but yeah I totally agree. An effective PSA would be a whole bunch of friends passing a pipe around, then the guy being like "oooooh shit so fucking high I forgot propane" and then the one who passes on the pipe being like "I'll drive to the store!" Laughs all around.

One problem I see with legalization is that people don't realize the simple fact that weed, well it gets you high. It's not like smoking a cigarette or having one or two beers. A single hit is good for me these days, but I used to smoke a lot more. But now that it's legal people who weren't fortunate to live in a city where the cops never gave a shit (unless you were black) about weed will be getting high off good shit, maybe for the first time, simply because they can, and not know their limits. I wasn't around for the lift on prohibition, but I doubt if there was dancing in the streets, drinking in front of cops because they could.

Drunk drivers are reckless and dangerous, usually. Stoned drivers, as shown by many road tests, are more prone to being OVERLY cautious and going too slow. Their biggest danger is the chance of becoming an obstruction for other cars because theyre driving TOO slowly for traffic.

However I don't condone driving intoxicated on anything.

The only time I have been stoned enough to negatively affect my driving was when I was leaving a 4-20 party (I know) that had water bongs, gravity bongs, cross joints, a weed butter infused chocolate fountain, various other edibles, and tons of pipes and joints being circulated. I had to leave before I was ready because my GF wanted me to drive her home. My driving was perfectly safe, but on the way home, on a route I had taken dozens of times before, I got lost. I wasn't actually lost; I just thought I was.

But of course, it affects different people differently, so obviously driving under the influence of anything isn't advised.

Stoners love anti-pot commercials. LOVE THEM.

And I assume we all know the difference between a drunk driver and a stoned driver? A drunk driver runs the stop sign and a stoned driver waits for it to turn green.


Personally I don't think driving high is anymore dangerous than driving tired. It still absolutely needs to be discouraged as a ticketable offense with more serious repercussions for repeat offenders. But, just in case any of you out there think it's as dangerous as driving drunk. You are utterly wrong.

I'm totally unable to drive if I'm not sober, but the only time I've felt really unsafe behind the wheel of a car with a stoned driver was when I was riding in the bass player's car to an out of town show we were playing and I had no idea he was stoned until he tried to drive the wrong way up an off ramp. But he handled the actual driving fine, it was more an issue of judgement.

Plus who knows what he'd gotten into before I showed up.

Some guy was trying to sell me ludes the other night when I was getting off of work. Pretty sure you haven't been able to buy those things since the late 90s. I felt bad for him and gave him a cigarette.

I think the term is "frenemy."

Yeah I was stone cold sober (save for a drink or two) trying to light one of these things up, put in too much and it blew up in my face. I got one for my wedding, but since I'm vegan I rarely grill in the first place (Boca Burgers are better with two minutes in the microwave anyway.) Like not exploded, but it definitely singed my hair and I was like "fuck this let's get tacos instead everyone." I was with in-laws who are almost on the Hank Hill level of how to do this and do that with propane, and they just laughed it off.