Between 1987 and 1991, comedian Joey Diaz was on probation in Boulder, Colorado — still using cocaine and locked in an escalating battle with a probation officer determined to catch him. What followed was a years-long improvised experiment in folk chemistry: iodine, white vinegar, fruit pectin, Drano, and a rubber douche taped to his anatomy. None of it worked. All of it made for one of the most unhinged stretches of anyone's criminal biography.
The Folk Remedy Gauntlet
The first tip Joey received was iodine. He took it. His skin turned red, his face burned, and he still came back positive. He stopped the iodine. Then came white vinegar — not a splash, but a full bottle chased with Gatorade every Monday morning. The logic: get high on Friday, hope it clears by Sunday, panic when the automated color-coded phone system calls your color on Monday morning.
"Yellow. God damn. Now I got five hours. The place closes at six."
After vinegar came Serto — a brand of liquid fruit pectin normally used to thicken homemade jams. The theory circulating in pre-internet word-of-mouth networks was that the fiber would trap drug metabolites in the digestive tract before they reached the urine. Joe Rogan pulled up the science in real time during the conversation: health professionals find no evidence that fruit pectin affects what the kidneys filter. Fiber works in the gut. It has no jurisdiction over urine.
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Joe Rogan reads aloud from a search result debunking Serto as a drug test folk remedy
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Joey's response was direct: the guy who gave him the Serto tip had done thirty years. The advice was authoritative not because it was correct, but because the source had survived long enough to seem credible.
The Products People Actually Sold
By the time commercial detox products hit head shops, Joey was already deep into his probation stretch. He notes that in 1989, there was no internet, no online marketplace — just street advice passed between people who had all made the same mistakes. Rogan pulled up images of the era's products: bottled synthetic urine sold under brand names like "Fetish Urine" and "Tinkle," labeled "not for human consumption" as a legal workaround.
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Screen showing commercial synthetic urine products including 'Fetish Urine' and 'Tinkle' packaging
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The Whizzinator — a prosthetic device designed to deliver substitute urine — was also discussed. Joey knew someone who had engineered a homemade version: a hot water bottle filled with his son's clean urine, connected to a repurposed douche tube, scotch-taped to his body. The apparatus eventually ruptured. The man, Joey notes with some reverence, was a bank robber serving thirty years.
The Drano Incident
Joey's most consequential attempt involved Drano — the household drain cleaner. He ground up a piece of it, packed it near the sample, and submitted the cup. The result was not a clean test. The result was a foam. Sitting on the probation officer's desk, the sealed cup began to shake, bubble, and expand. When the officer picked it up to process it, the container had been pressurized from the inside.
It broke the testing machine.
The probation officer called Joey days later and told him he was being written up and taken to court. The department, Joey recalls, eventually placed him on a kind of administrative hold — declining to test him further because they genuinely did not know what he would submit next. They considered sending him back to a halfway house for ninety days.
The Bladder Injection Legend
Joey's account prompted Rogan to raise a story from the early days of UFC drug testing: a fighter so heavily on steroids that he allegedly had clean urine injected directly into his bladder via needle — or, as a later correction suggested, possibly via catheter. Rogan acknowledged he didn't know if the story was true. Joey's point was simpler: people in that position don't stop because they can't. Coming off heavy steroid use means losing the muscle mass the entire career is built on. The extreme measures follow logically from that constraint.
"These are the levels that you do," Joey said. "Nothing works. Nothing."
Getting Off Probation — and Out of Boulder
The escape from probation came not through chemistry but through a chance encounter. Joey met a man named Bill Wise at a pool, struck up a conversation over three months, and eventually learned Wise was a district attorney in Boulder. Joey told him the truth about his situation. Wise told him to have his attorney draw up a statement, signed it, and terminated the probation. Joey describes it as the luckiest moment of his life.
Bill Wise, Joey notes, was later caught up in the Jon Benét Ramsey investigation fallout and lost his job. Joey never forgot the favor.
More than thirty years later, Joey says he still won't return to Boulder — not because of legal exposure, but because of shame. He describes stealing lawnmowers from Kmart using receipts that flew off in the wind, running shakedowns on a local Italian shop owner who mistook him for a mafia witness in relocation, snorting cocaine off the metal surfaces inside a walk-in ATM vestibule while Broncos playoff games kept everyone else occupied. He describes the city as peaceful, beautiful, and entirely unprepared for him.
"I brought chaos," he said. "And it was too much."
He's considering booking the Fox Theater there — to take his lumps, make a donation, and apologize publicly. Whether that happens or not, the Boulder years remain a case study in what addiction actually looks like at operational scale: not a slow fade, but an arms race against a system, fought with drain cleaner and fruit jam, that nobody wins.
