Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Kids are resourceful, especially when it comes to
Speaker 1: having a good time. They can take any object like
Speaker 1: a ball, a stick, or even a can and turn
Speaker 1: it into a fun way to pass time. But back
Speaker 1: in the sixties, a new kind of pastime had developed
Speaker 1: into a full blown epidemic, one that put an entire
Speaker 1: country on watch and had everyone wondering are the kids
Speaker 1: all right? It was in Chicago in the fall all
Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty nine when the American Academy of Pediatrics
Speaker 1: held its annual conference. Ernest Caribia Jr. Was one of
Speaker 1: two government officials in attendance that day. He worked at
Speaker 1: the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, while Frank Gulich worked for
Speaker 1: the Chicago Narcotics Bureau. Ernest and Frank had come with
Speaker 1: a shocking warning for the medical community. There was something
Speaker 1: causing hundreds, maybe thousands of hospitalizations and deaths across the country.
Speaker 1: The two officials released their findings at a press conference
Speaker 1: where they explain how America's youth had discovered a dangerous
Speaker 1: new drug which they were injecting into their bodies at
Speaker 1: an alarming rate. That drug was called peanut butter. Now
Speaker 1: this wasn't a clever name for some new designer drug.
Speaker 1: Ernest and Frank claimed that the kids everywhere were actually
Speaker 1: injecting themselves with real peanut butter and in some cases
Speaker 1: mayonnaise too, just to get high. This sharp rise in
Speaker 1: food based drug use, they claimed, was due to the
Speaker 1: popularity of an underground recipe book making the rounds for
Speaker 1: dollar apiece. Now, obviously they were more than a little concerned.
Speaker 1: Injecting any kind of food product into one's veins would
Speaker 1: result in death anyway, not because of hallucinogetic side effects,
Speaker 1: but because they would literally block the flow of blood
Speaker 1: throughout the body. The Associated press ran with the story,
Speaker 1: which was then published in the San Francisco Chronicle in
Speaker 1: an article titled kids Shooting peanut butter in Chicago. It
Speaker 1: ran under the headline peanut butter mayonnaise used as drug substitutes.
Speaker 1: Each piece stated that the act of tripping out on
Speaker 1: such culinary items was new and that several deaths had
Speaker 1: occurred as a result of it, but none of the
Speaker 1: articles offered any evidence to actually support such effect. One
Speaker 1: narcotics expert who worked for the Ohio Attorney General was
Speaker 1: quoted in one article as having handled a case where
Speaker 1: a teenager had injected himself with peanut butter. As the
Speaker 1: story spread, information and anecdotes changed. Authorities in some states
Speaker 1: alleged to have known of cases where children had died
Speaker 1: from peanut butter and mayonnaise use, while others made it
Speaker 1: clear that even though the use was documented, no deaths
Speaker 1: had occurred. Still, the headlines caused quite a scare wherever
Speaker 1: they were published. Richard Nixon even noted the crisis in
Speaker 1: his public papers, published in October of nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: But by nineteen seventy, the peanut butter and mayo panic
Speaker 1: had died out, which begs the question had there ever
Speaker 1: really been an epidemic of intravenous food highs to begin with?
Speaker 1: Years later, experts believe the whole thing stemmed from a
Speaker 1: combination of governmental paranoia and gross misunderstanding. You see as
Speaker 1: the sixties were coming to a close. Drugs like marijuana
Speaker 1: and L s D were becoming harder to find. In
Speaker 1: some places, anti drug groups were worried that young people
Speaker 1: would start looking inside and outside the home for legal replacements.
Speaker 1: These included industrial substances like glue and paint, as well
Speaker 1: as food products such as peanut butter. However, according to
Speaker 1: medical journals and other sources, no cases of inappropriate peanut
Speaker 1: butter use was ever documented. There had been only a
Speaker 1: small handful of recorded anecdotes in news and magazine articles.
Speaker 1: For example, the director of a school for troubled youths
Speaker 1: in Arizona spoke to a reporter in April of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine about the rampant drug use in his school.
Speaker 1: The boys he watched over, he claimed, would do anything
Speaker 1: to get high. They'd sniff glue, drink cough syrup, and yes,
Speaker 1: even inject themselves with peanut butter. The other reason for
Speaker 1: the scare most likely came from mistaking slang terms for
Speaker 1: drugs as the actual products. On occasion, peanut butter was
Speaker 1: the name given to brown colored methamphetamine, while heroin and
Speaker 1: cocaine used to be referred to as mayonnaise. These misunderstandings,
Speaker 1: combined with the stories from exhausted educators, eventually spiraled into
Speaker 1: a full blown imaginary epidemic. It had grown so rampant
Speaker 1: that the federal government decided to step in and make
Speaker 1: a formal statement to the press, but clearly that only
Speaker 1: made things worse. In the end, there had been nothing
Speaker 1: to be afraid of. American kids weren't injecting themselves with
Speaker 1: peanut butter and mayonnaise to get high. Most, however, did
Speaker 1: have a condition that most parents today are highly aware
Speaker 1: of a very bad case of the munchies. Oftentimes, when
Speaker 1: we set out to look for a missing object, we
Speaker 1: wind up finding something entirely different. A hunt for a
Speaker 1: pair of lost eyeglasses might yield the discovery of a
Speaker 1: pair of headphones that had fallen behind the night stand
Speaker 1: weeks earlier. Or, if you're lucky, that glorious little green
Speaker 1: rectangle that turns out to be a folded twenty dollar bill.
Speaker 1: If you're explorer Robert Peery, though the search for the
Speaker 1: North Pole could drop a whole new island in your lap.
Speaker 1: Pierry had set out on an expedition to find the
Speaker 1: North Pole in nineteen oh six. He'd already made five
Speaker 1: trips to the Arctic Circle, but he'd always dreamt of
Speaker 1: being the first person to a step foot on the
Speaker 1: North Pole. His dream, however, hadn't been realized just yet.
Speaker 1: He returned home and wrote a book called Nearest the
Speaker 1: Pole about his almost successful trip. But it hadn't been
Speaker 1: a total loss. Peery might not have found the poll,
Speaker 1: he said, but he had located something else that no
Speaker 1: one had ever seen before, an entirely new land. He
Speaker 1: called it Crocker Land, which he named after a wealthy
Speaker 1: businessman named George Crocker in hopes that the man would
Speaker 1: fund his next attempt at the North Pole. And Crocker
Speaker 1: was on board, at least he would have been, had
Speaker 1: he not promised to allocate that money to another worthwhile project,
Speaker 1: rebuilding San Francisco after the devastating nineteen o six earthquake.
Speaker 1: No problem, thought Peery. He'd just find another benefactor, one
Speaker 1: with a passion for exploration, so he asked the National
Speaker 1: Geographic Society for help, which they happily provided. In nineteen
Speaker 1: o nine, the fully funded Peery and his team set
Speaker 1: out for Crocker Land and not only made it, but
Speaker 1: were then able to push onto in North Pole as well.
Speaker 1: Peary was elated, as you might imagine, after almost twenty
Speaker 1: five years of trying, he had finally done it. He
Speaker 1: had become the first man to reach the North Pole
Speaker 1: before anyone else. He returned home a hero, or so
Speaker 1: he thought. According to Frederick Cook, a man who had
Speaker 1: been a crew member on a previous, unrelated expedition, Peary
Speaker 1: was only the second person to have reached the pole. Cook,
Speaker 1: you see, claimed that he had done it a year earlier.
Speaker 1: Peery's new rival had also read the man's memoir and
Speaker 1: noted how the journeys had been eerily similar. Yet Cook
Speaker 1: had not seen any trace of crocker Land as he
Speaker 1: had made his way to the pole. Peary was incensed.
Speaker 1: Of course, crocker Land was real. Perhaps Cook just wasn't
Speaker 1: as skilled an explorer as he was. Along for the
Speaker 1: trip to the pole had been Peery's assistant, Donald McMillan,
Speaker 1: who stepped up in defense of his friend and mentor.
Speaker 1: He vowed to lead his own expedition to crocker Land
Speaker 1: and proved everyone, especially to Cook, that the land mass
Speaker 1: was real. The trip was doubly important because crocker Land
Speaker 1: represented the last bit of land on Earth that had
Speaker 1: not been touched by humanity. Three different organizations funded McMillan's trip,
Speaker 1: including the American Museum of Natural History in New York,
Speaker 1: the American Geographical Society, and the University of Illinois. If
Speaker 1: only McMillan had planned a little better, as captain had
Speaker 1: a nasty habit of drinking while sailing, which caused the ship,
Speaker 1: the Diana, to crash on the way to Greenland. The
Speaker 1: crew chartered a new ship called the Eric and continued on,
Speaker 1: but the weather was starting to turn cold, and pretty
Speaker 1: soon they wouldn't be able to make it through the
Speaker 1: icy waters to Crocker Land. For four years, the explorers
Speaker 1: searched for the island, yet no matter how many times
Speaker 1: they scanned the horizon, they came up empty. They began
Speaker 1: to wonder maybe Peery had been wrong all along. Whatever
Speaker 1: he had seen wasn't an untouched land mass, Perhaps it
Speaker 1: had all just been a mirage. But Peery swore that
Speaker 1: Crocker Land had been real. Numerous expeditions were conducted to
Speaker 1: verify its existence over the years, but none of them
Speaker 1: ever found it, and in night, a pilot flew his
Speaker 1: plane over the area where Peery Clain crocker Land was
Speaker 1: located and saw nothing. Either the island had disappeared or
Speaker 1: Peary had been wrong in what he'd seen. Of course,
Speaker 1: there could have always been a third reason for Pery's claims.
Speaker 1: He'd really just wanted the money, with no viable prospects
Speaker 1: to provide him with the funding for his next North
Speaker 1: Pole expedition. Peery had tried to scam George Crocker with
Speaker 1: an offer of immortality in exchange for fifty thou dollars,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be out of the question. Peery is also
Speaker 1: the same explorer who visited Greenland in seven and, in
Speaker 1: true colonial fashion, stole three massive meteorites from the local Inuits,
Speaker 1: meteor RTEs that had been their only source of iron,
Speaker 1: and then he sailed his plunder to New York City
Speaker 1: along with six of the Inuit he enticed with promises
Speaker 1: of warm homes and good hunting. Instead, he put them
Speaker 1: on display and charged admission to the crowds. So yeah,
Speaker 1: shady dealings were well within the realm of possibility for
Speaker 1: Robert Pierry. There's no denying his endurance and toughness, as
Speaker 1: his truck to the North Pole demonstrated to the world,
Speaker 1: but it's easy to understand why some might doubt his
Speaker 1: more unusual claims. Had it been real, crocker Land would
Speaker 1: have been added to every map and textbook for eternity,
Speaker 1: a perfect gift for a man who, like George Crocker,
Speaker 1: had just about everything. Unfortunately, the whole thing turned out
Speaker 1: to be exactly what it sounded like, a croc. I
Speaker 1: Hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
Speaker 1: the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
Speaker 1: was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
Speaker 1: which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
Speaker 1: you can learn all about it over at the World
Speaker 1: of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,