The others were listed in a similar article. The small tire pressure gauge was told to me by a friend who at one point had a crack habit and used said items to smoke crack and said it was a well known item to use for such a purpose.
Your original comment makes it sound like the main purpose of the small spoon is for cocaine - "Turns out it was for coke". But it's not "for coke", it's for stirring your coffee, and it's just that cocaine users found an alternative use for it. The article makes this pretty clear.
Okay, you convinced me about that one (I haven't heard about this love rose thing before, and I don't live in the US). But my point about the stirrers still stands.
I also think that the cheap socks are just that. But maybe they're popular due to their additional unintended use.
The size of the clientele for many of these things probably would have been much smaller without the illicit uses, and they probably were created without illicit motives. Once there is demand, however, the further use was probably quantifiable as legit vs. off-brand use and even if one maker of glass tubes (for e.g.) stops because they're useful as rock pipes of some kind, someone else would be happy to pick up the slack.
thanks for the link. I have seen full sized roses in plastic tubes at gas stations and I was trying to figure out how those could be used for drugs. These little ones make more sense.
I think I was 15 when I called bullshit on that coffee spoon. I didn't understand what was going on exactly, but part of me knew that was a stupid size for coffee. I may have even joked about it being for cocaine, but I don't think I was serious about that. Nobody where I lived used cocaine, right?
That ugly disposable McDonald's branded spoon doesn't strike me as something that 70s-80s era women would view as being "cool" or "hip". I really doubt a guy like Burt Reynolds would spend a few grand on a small amount of blow and then cheap out on the spoon.
The others were listed in a similar article. The small tire pressure gauge was told to me by a friend who at one point had a crack habit and used said items to smoke crack and said it was a well known item to use for such a purpose.