References to drugs are everywhere: in movies, popular culture, art, etc. Often, slang words are used to replace the actual names of the drugs. “Charlie”, “Mary Jane”, “smack”, and “junk” are all alternative names for well-known drugs. Can you guess which ones? In this lesson, you will learn all of these and more. Come and get your fix with Ronnie! If you don’t want to learn these words, please don’t watch, and please don’t comment. I DON’T CARE 🙂 Take the quiz here: http://www.engvid.com/talking-about-drugs-in-english/ TRANSCRIPT Did you do drugs today? No. But really, did you do drugs today? Everyone says “no”. Maybe you did. But I need you to double check. I need you to look at this list of drugs and tell me honestly. Look me in the eyes, and tell me. Did you do drugs today? I did drugs today. I do drugs every day. But the drug that I do is caffeine. Do you know that caffeine was a drug? Are you aware of that? Do you also know that alcohol is a drug? So the next time you say, “I don’t do drugs”, over a coffee, over a beer, or over a cigarette, guess what? You’re doing drugs. Welcome to the drugs lesson. Do drugs, people. Makes your life more interesting. As I told you, I do drugs every day. Mine is caffeine. I drink coffee every morning. Every morning, I wake up, and I do drugs. How about you? Do you do drugs in the morning? Afternoon? Caffeine is a drug. Slang — also known as coffee, tea, Red Bull and chocolate. In today’s lesson, I’m going to teach you some slang words about different kinds of drugs. I don’t think you should do these drugs. I don’t recommend them. If you want to, go ahead. But again, teaching you slang vocabulary will help you understand things in movies. So let’s go with the list. As I said, we have caffeine, which is found in coffee, tea, Red Bull, chocolate. A lot of soft drinks add caffeine as well. So basically, colas or Cokes. In Canada, we call it “pop”. Then, we have probably the most common drug ever: alcohol. The slang for alcohol could be “booze”. Also, we call beer a “brew”. We also call beer “suds”. So all of these words are slang for “alcohol”. We’re going to get into some hard drugs now. These ones are pretty, pretty terrible. One of the most tragic and very common drugs, unfortunately, is heroin. The street name or the slang name is “H”, “junk”, or “smack”. There’s also, like, “brown tar” and all these different slang words for “heroin”, but these, I think, are the most common. When you watch movies like Trainspotting or — a lot of movies deal with heroin addiction. A lot of famous rock stars did heroin, and now, they’re dead. Bye-bye. This is what we’re talking about, “H”, “junk”, and “smack”. A really popular drug, all the way from Colombia, of Pablo Escobar fame: cocaine. So many songs have been written about cocaine. In the 1980s, probably the most popular drug in the world ever — short form or slang, we call it “coke” — that makes sense, “coke”, “cocaine” — “blow”, “Charlie” — I guess that’s his name — or “nose candy” because you sniff the cocaine in your nose. So it’s like candy for your nose. There’s a drug that was really, really popular in the 90s called “MDMA”, also known as “ecstasy” or just “E”. And ecstasy comes in a pill form. Cocaine is actually a powder. Heroin is a brown powder. Alcohol is a liquid. And caffeine is a liquid, or it can be in solid form like chocolate. The next drug that is really, really common — and all too common nowadays — is this big long drug called “methamphetamine”. You may have heard the term “meth”. Now, people who do meth or methamphetamine, they can inject it, which means they put it in a needle in their veins. So it can be injected. And it is a powder, like heroin. Oh, heroin is injected or smoked. But methamphetamine or “meth” or “crystal meth” or “crystal”, as people call it, is a really, really big problem in America and Canada. It’s causing something called “meth mouth”, and “meth mouth” causes the people’s teeth to rot out and fall out. So the basically lose all their teeth. How attractive. Also, meth heads have a lot of scars on their face. There are a lot of open sores, and they have no teeth. Beautiful, beautiful people. Good idea. So methamphetamine — street name is “meth” or “crystal”. Very, very terrible, terrible drug, like most of them.