A drug that never was
Every so often, a rumor as grotesque as it is persistent reappears on social media and messaging apps: that dried pigeon droppings, when properly “cured,” get you high. It supposedly contains its own alkaloid—”palominina” or “palomiscina”—with stimulant and hallucinogenic effects, and even a name with classical resonances. None of this is real. There is no such substance, no such alkaloid, and not a single shred of pharmacological data to support the idea.
The interesting part is not the falsehood itself—hoaxes about homemade drugs are legion—but that in this case, we know its birth certificate with precision. Palomiscina did not arise from ignorance, but from humor: it was deliberately invented, in a matter of hours, by a handful of forum users who knew exactly what they were doing.
The precedent: prison spiderwebs
The story reconstructed by Eduardo Hidalgo starts years earlier with another minor myth. In 1995, Raúl del Pino—then webmaster of Psiconáutica—included a comment on his site that he had heard in passing: that in South American prisons, inmates smoked spiderwebs to “get high.” He published it almost as a curiosity, even warning that there was barely any data on the subject.
Some time later, he realized it was nothing more than a hoax and deleted the reference from his portal. The revealing detail arrived nearly fifteen years later: the exact sentence he had written and deleted was still circulating, copied verbatim, across countless pages and threads about “homemade drugs.” A single line published without a filter had become immortal on the web. From that surprise, the idea was born, half in jest, to manufacture a myth on purpose to see what would happen.
September 14, 2008: the involuntary experiment
No one planned the experiment. It just happened. In September 2008, in a Cannabis Café thread about supposed homemade drugs, a user evoked the old joke about kids claiming to get high on methane from cow dung. Another forum member responded by remembering “pigeon droppings.” From that point on, message by message, several participants built a complete myth together, with its physical description, its fake alkaloid, its pseudoscientific nomenclature, and even its historical mythology.
The result was a transparent parody, but formally impeccable: it perfectly imitated the tone of substance fact sheets, “harm reduction” warnings, and tales of addiction and redemption. It included increasingly absurd inventions—Minoan, Viking, and Ottoman genealogies; a supposed “Columbus Ether”; testimonies of shattered dependency—topped off with a wink so absurd it gave the joke away. Any attentive reader could see it was a gag; but the form was indistinguishable from a “serious” hoax.
Why this hoax didn’t succeed (and why others do)
Palomiscina never truly went viral, and the reason is instructive. It remained buried within a long and clearly jocular thread, where the context made it evident that it was a game among forum regulars. It lacked the step that turns a joke into an urban legend: being extracted from its context and repackaged as fact.
If, instead of a chain of ironic messages, someone had rewritten all of that as a “news story,” a testimonial, or a blog post presented in earnest, the outcome could have been very different. This is exactly what happened with bananadine—the 1960s fantasy about smoking banana peels—which jumped from a countercultural publication to the mainstream press and still persists today. Stripped of the clues that mark it as fiction, a well-written text can travel the entire web, be cited by journalists, alarm families and institutions, and even generate “testimonies” from users who swear they have tried it.
Critical reading: how to recognize a drug myth
The case of palomiscina serves as a vaccine. Some patterns repeat in almost all these hoaxes:
- Total absence of real pharmacology. Active ingredients with impressive-sounding names are invented, but there is no chemical structure, mechanism of action, or a single verifiable reference. A name that rhymes with the substance (“palomiscina” from paloma) is a bad sign.
- The accessibility argument. “It’s natural, free, and everywhere, far from dealers and the State.” This is a classic rhetorical hook that appeals to distrust, not evidence.
- Instant mythology. Ancient cultures, lost wisdom, establishment repression. The more epic the story and the vaguer the data, the more you should be suspicious.
- Unverified testimony. “A friend of a friend tried it.” Urban legends live precisely on that source which can never be checked.
- Literal copying. If a sentence appears identical on dozens of websites, it is not confirmation: it is propagation. We saw this with the spiderwebs.
It is also worth remembering the other side of the blade. Just as imaginary and harmless substances circulate, false information about very real substances also circulates: invented “safe” doses, mixtures presented as harmless, supposed homemade antidotes. Regarding any claim about psychoactives—whether the substance exists or not—the healthy attitude is the same: look for verified sources, distrust orphaned data, and do not confuse what is repeated often with what is proven.
The real discovery
The beauty of the episode is that its authors did not want to deceive anyone: they wanted to show the mechanism. Without intending to, they documented in real time how a group of people with a sense of humor can assemble, in an afternoon, a myth as plausible in its form as any of those that millions of people take for granted. Palomiscina teaches us nothing about pigeons; it teaches us a lot about ourselves and the ease with which the web manufactures certainties out of thin air.
