Salmon the Betta Fish, an Emotional Support Animal at Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Illinois, reportedly got high after his owner and a group of Creative Writing Majors used his tank as a bong on April 20th.
In celebration of the national holiday, Salmon’s owner and caretaker, Emily Langston, invited several people from her Intro to Queer Non-Fiction Writing class over to her dorm room to smoke some marijuana. When it was discovered that no one in the group remembered to bring any glass pieces or rolling papers, the team was forced to improvise.
“We took a tube from my old hamster’s cage and stuck it to the fish tank filter with a command strip to smoke out of and then we used his plastic food container as the bowl to put the weed in,” says Emily, a second-year student at the college. When asked where they put Salmon’s food, Emily said, “I put some of it in a ziplock baggie and my friend Colin ate the rest of it.” When Colin asked why he ate it, Colin responded, “I was hungry and Emily only had M&Ms. I’m lactose intolerant, so those give me the shits. Also, I think the plastic fumes from the burning food container made me curious.”
We also asked about Emily’s thought process behind letting Salmon stay in the tank while the group smoked the weed rather than transferring him into another container. Emily responded, “He seemed into it.”
We considered talking to the dorm Residential Assistant, but it turns out she was also in Emily’s room smoking the fish weed. “I felt like I should’ve told them to stop or report them, but I was so impressed with their creativity that I just let it happen,” says Emily’s RA, who later added that the fish bong water splashed in her mouth at one point and tasted “Kind of like the Miso soup at Benihana.”
We decided to check in on Salmon to see how he was doing after this debacle. When we visited his tank, it appeared that he had converted his Spongebob Squarepants Pineapple House into a smoothie shop, where he invests in Crypto as a side business.
