DENVER—A new illicit drug that is incredibly cheap, highly addictive, and extremely easy to produce is appearing in school yards across the country, the fevered imaginations of the nation’s mothers who need something to fret over confirmed today.
The totally contrived drug that in no way exists in any objective reality and is only real in the minds of mothers is known by its street name, “scramp,” and according to moms who previously did not have enough actual things to worry about, a batch can be made from everyday household supplies such as sugar, window cleaner, and petroleum jelly.
As recently as last week, the nation’s moms created a completely fictitious scenario—the sole purpose of which was to worry themselves sick—wherein household glue could also be used to create scramp.
“Right after my husband and I agreed our son was responsible enough to drive on his own, this scramp epidemic comes along,” 39-year-old mother of two Gayathri Bhowmik told reporters as she wrote a letter to her senator demanding stronger legislation against the scramp menace that grows each day in her mind. “I’ve heard all the kids in his class are doing it. They have big ’scramping’ parties where they go to the house of someone whose parents are on vacation, and they take scramp all night and it turns into a big drug orgy.”
“It’s only going to get worse,” Bhowmik added of the scramp scourge that is not happening.
Mothers whose concerns for their children’s safety has veered into a mass hysteria said teenage users ingest scramp either by licking it, swallowing it, smoking it, snorting it, injecting it, or putting it under their eyelids in order to experience sensations of euphoria, bodily dissociation, dizziness, and a unique altered mind state that cannot be easily described because it is not a physiological reality.
Additionally, mothers who feel the need to lose sleep at night say that any amount of scramp is capable of causing a fatal overdose at any time.
“My oldest has been coming home from school and going straight to his room,” said Dubuque, IA mother Debra Verhulst, who just last month began allowing her 15-year-old son Alex to date. “He sits in there for hours on end, doing God knows what. Sometimes he’s really hungry, but sometimes he’s not hungry at all, and when I ask him if he’s scramping, he just rolls his eyes and tells me he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He never used to talk to me like that.”
“It must be the scramp,” added Verhulst, her eyes welling up with tears at the thought of her child’s fabricated problem with the fake drug. “My son is a scramp-head! What did I do wrong?”
Despite the shared delusion that scramp is virtually undetectable and that any young person could be on it at any time, mothers said there are still telltale signs your teen could be scramping, including lethargy, too much energy, untucked shirts, watching an hour or more of television a night, staying out past curfew, and questioning authority.
A recent poll found 95 percent of overprotective mothers with children between the ages of 12 and 18 are aware of the completely made-up drug, and 73 percent are “pretty sure” at least one of their kid’s friends has tried it. In order to combat the fictional scourge, the recently formed group Mothers Against Scramp Abuse (MASA) has published a pamphlet titled “Talk To Your Kids About Scramping” and sent it to hundreds of churches and youth organizations nationwide.
“We must work together to keep scramp out of our schools before our children become just another statistic,” said MASA founder Helen Perry, whose 14-year-old son died of scramp-related causes in her imagination three months ago and again last week. “Just look at what happened to Tim Kepler, a 17-year old Boise boy who I heard jumped from a radio tower after trying scramp just once. These scramp pushers will stop at nothing to get your child to take their poison, and once they do, your kids are hooked for life.”
With incidents of scramping up 3,000 percent over the past year in the minds of thousands of American mothers, use of the nonexistent drug has prompted mothers to wonder if they can ever truly protect their children
“Today, it’s scramping; tomorrow, who knows?” Perry asked. “Dooping? Frazzing? Heroin? Quockling? I just want my baby to be safe from these kinds of terrible drugs until he goes to college and I have all sorts of other things to worry about.”
