If you are a parent, you better beware of what your son or daughter is up to. This is because many youngsters these days have taken to alcoholic drinks and drugs to get high. One of their favourities is a local drink called Skoochies.
If you’ve never heard the word, ‘Skoochies‘, and you claim to be in the ‘street’, then your street credentials need to be re-evaluated. At least, that’s what a regular drinker of the concoction, would tell you.
In simple terms, ‘Skoochies’ is a ‘street cocktail’ made from cannabis/weed leaves. The leaves are boiled and the juice is sieved and mixed with different solvents such as alcohol, milk, sugary drinks and more. Its popularity among Nigerian celebrities is rapidly growing and it has deceptive health benefits as well as sexual enhancement credentials that have made it a replacement for other street drinks like alomo, ogidiga, jedi-drinks and others that reigned supreme in the time past. A research on the drink written by Ryan Hurd on Livestrong.com, states, ‘cannabis tea does has health benefits; some of which are predictable, and others that are not. Like smoking Marijuana, drinking the tea may relieve anxiety, while reducing nausea and chronic pain. Unlike smoking Marijuana, the tea is not inhaled through the lungs and thus does not contain the risk of developing long-term lung problems, like emphysema. Surprisingly, cannabis tea may help treat autoimmune diseases‘.
Would you agree with him and say maybe this is why Nigerians rush for the drink?
Skoochies has become a popular drink at night clubs, but recently its popularity has spread like a wild fire in the street. Infact, it is believed to have originated from the night clubs as it was regarded as the drink of street boys.
Telling you what this drink can do to you would be futile, considering the fact that a popular music act, has already said all that needs to be said. In an interview he told his radio host what he could expect to do on a trip to the city of his birth. “We go to clubs just to drink Skoochies…that shit is gonna knock you out men, that shit is gonna send you to sleep”., he laughed.
No lies here. One drink, many uses. Even though it looks like what could pass for a soft drinks, skoochies packs a massive punch that makes it a favourite for many Lagosians, who simply want to zoom out and blur the lines between reality and what goes on in their heads.
Somewhere between Marijuana and the alcohol, some believe that a shot of skoochies improves sexual performance. “If you take one cup, guy, you go dey well”, says Dayo, not real name, an accountant, who frequents cafe serving the drink on Saturdays, Sundays and anytime he gets the chance, “Na why I dey buy the bottle for house, I no fit dey rush go the cafe everytime wey babe dey come”.
Some use skoochies because its intoxication comes with a wave of aggressiveness. At street corners in Ojuelegba, you would find motor park touts drinking cups of skoochies mixed with other substances that only them can identify. When skoochies crossed Third Mainland Bridge into Victoria Island, it got refined and sophistacated, apart from the extra spring in the steps of people drinking it to prepare for a day in a life where you can be filled with joy and merriment, until a well-built conductor slaps the happiness out of your life if you are in a bus, the wide range of people who are drinking skoochies means that it is subject to different uses. Among older people, it is not unusual to find a bottle of palm wine being drank with the cocktail.
For some, skoochies is not enough to take them to the heights they want, so they mix it with other alcoholic beverages like stout, beer or brandy. That’s why science students like skoochies so much, because depending on how you’re feeling at any time of the day, you can mix it with anything you want to recreate skoochies on your own terms, because there are no rules and even if there were, you’d be too intoxicated to make any sense of them.
The drink is already widely consumed and like all things that can make you to be on the high, Nigerian musicians have paid tribute. Olamide, ever the disciple of the streets, he so fervently represents, has been singing about skoochies since he got high on the cocktail and Alomo and made “Stupid Love”. In 2016, street-hop singer, Asha Gangali, also known as Ostopolos, released a song in honour of the drink, aptly entitled: “Skoochies”, off his #KalakutaStateOfMindEP.
Rapper Ms Chief also offered her own tribute in form of a song entitled: “Skushi” in honour of the drink (which everyone seems to spell in different ways).
On the other hand, musicians like Wizkid and Burna Boy do not hesitate to mention it in the same breath as marijuana or Hennessy. So, when next you see your favourite celeb holding that ‘RED’ cup, it could be skoochies! And guess what, it’s like drinking tea; you won’t smell the awful stench of alcohol. And for the veterans correcting the spelling of ‘Skoochies’, we know it has many spellings (Skuchiez, Skushes, Skushies… and more) but until the word is adopted by the Oxford Dictionary, we are sticking with ‘Skoochies’.
Whoever wrote the chemical properties of codeine on medical websites would not have thought that they could be harnessed to make a cup of skoochies, complemented with other drinks like Bajinotu or Action Bitters.
This sort of deadly concoction could only be made by the people whom Olamide refered to as “Science Students”. A sip could drop you in another universe, where science subjects are more important than life itself and you have to keep mixing different drinks to stay alive.
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