'It Starts Bombing You in the Head': The Mystery of the Super Strong 'Creepy' Weed
The so-called “creepy”—referenced in music by everyone from Bad Bunny to Pablo Chill-E—has been found from Chile to Costa Rica. But what is inside the potentially toxic weed that seems to be everywhere in Latin America?
SANTIAGO, Chile—Underground Chilean rapper Wolf 707 sat in a park in Santiago, smirking at the question—what is “creepy” marijuana?
Wolf 707 is as good an expert as any on the subject, often rapping about creepy, telling VICE News he smokes weed “everyday, all day.” Sometimes “every 10, 20 minutes.”
In one hypnotic song called “Blunts”, the rapper ruminated in a velvety flow on the mysterious substance in Spanish, perhaps best translated as “always burning, I feel happy/they tell us bad news, I’m not even there/You wanna smoke, you gotta earn it/I want that ‘creepy’ skull pain.”
The headache he mentions on the track is a common affect of creepy, he said, especially when you smoke the creepy negro (black).
“It starts like bombing you in the head, it’s like boom boom boom. And then the pain comes. The strong creepy, you gotta hit it with caution brother,” he said.
“I’ve tried creepy that has a flavor like gasoline,” he said. “One time I was smoking with some friends, it had like an anaesthetic, like I smoked the creepy and my mouth fell asleep. There’s different ways they mix it, variations like that.”
You really don’t know what you’re getting with creepy, until you smoke it. That’s why some of his friends “won’t smoke creepy because it gives them panic attacks, it hits them harder.”
Over the past half dozen years or so the powerful “creepy” has proliferated around Latin America, being found everywhere from Chile to Costa Rica. Experts claim it has levels of THC much higher than regular marijuana, while also sometimes displaying a wide range of dangerous side effects, raising health concerns in numerous countries. But no one seems to clearly know what the so-called creepy—sometimes written colloquially as krippy, cripi or cr1p1—actually is.
“The cannabis has a super different potency” from normal marijuana said Ximena Steinberg Acuña, an investigator at the Chilean non-profit Science Foundation for Cannabis.
“In fact, the effect seems to be quite different in people who use creepy, they describe the perception of the effects as being rather depressing,” she told VICE News. “They feel a little, like, an exaggerated introspectiveness. Sometimes it generates a bit of paranoia.”
Steinberg Acuña said that while the government has an “exact definition” of what creepy is as “genetically modified marijuana” from Colombia, she wasn’t so sure. On the streets, creepy weed was everywhere in different forms. She suspected that what’s being called creepy in Chile may be mixed with “synthetic cannabis,” although she’s uncertain too.
The Rise of “Creepy” Weed
Creepy marijuana continues to be found across Latin America. In September, Chilean authorities announced the seizure of roughly 400 kilos of creepy marijuana at a port in the city of Valparaiso while Costa Rican authorities announced a massive bust of 5.5 tons in January. Last year, Brazilian authorities discovered 3.5 tons of creepy traveling on ships down a river in the Amazon. But the genesis of creepy began in Colombia in the past dozen years or so.
Miguel Tunjano, a former Colombian anti-narcotics officer for over two decades who investigated the country’s cannabis producers at the time and published several studies for the Justice Ministry, told VICE News that the origins of creepy began in the northern province of Cuaca. He said that over the years Colombian authorities pinpointed a certain kind of cannabis being produced in the region where “the cultivators have concentrated the THC, psychoactive cannabinoids, upwards of 18 percent.” He said that authorities had discovered marijuana with THC as high as 28 percent on occasion. THC potency in marijuana in general has increased in the past decades, but still usually only averages around 15 percent today.
He compared the process of raising the THC to alcohol, like turning “a beer into a whiskey.”
Marijuana known as “creepy,” meaning high THC marijuana coming from Cauca appeared in Colombian news reports as early as 2011, and in 2012 Colombian police made a 3.6 ton bust of the creepy in the region. But somewhere along the way, the word “creepy” became used in “marketing” for any form of strong cannabis, said Tunjano.
One moment the former officer believed launched creepy towards the mainstream was a song “that made this brand really famous,” referring to an early hit by global superstar Bad Bunny called “Krippy Kush” in 2017. On the absurdly catchy hook, the Puerto Rican crooner repeatedly belts out the words “krippy” and “kush”. The music video alone has over 800 million views on Youtube.
It also seeped into Chile’s popular culture in recent years and especially its burgeoning trap scene, considered one of the most up-and-coming and influential in the region, with creepy mentioned in songs by a who's who of artists like arguably the country’s biggest rapper Pablo Chill-E.
In 2019, Tunjano was invited to Santiago to meet Chilean authorities about the surge of creepy in the country. He came to believe that not everything on the streets in Chile, and other Latin American countries, was actually Colombian creepy, because now, “it’s a commercial brand, not a strain.”
Santiago police organized crime and anti narcotics boss Guillermo Gálvez told VICE News that he couldn’t say for sure exactly when creepy started appearing on the city’s streets, but around a half decade or so “people began to talk about creepy marijuana that came from Colombia and a myth was created surrounding it regarding the amount of THC, that it was more powerful and that it was better than other marijuana, which at that time was the Paraguayan-pressed marijuana.”
For decades the region's most notorious marijuana was the legendary pressed “paraguayo/a”, an ultracheap brick weed found across Latin America. Grown in the inland South American nation of Paraguay where it takes its name, the cannabis is often corrupted by toxins because of poor techniques during the production process and the use of pesticides to control insects. It is later laced with everything from gasoline to marmalade using often rudimentary pressing equipment to compress the weed and block its odor while crossing borders. From Argentina to Colombia, the paraguayo sold for dirt-cheap prices, but in recent years it’s appeared less and less as the creepy market has boomed.
Gálvez said that the authorities refuse to call locally produced marijuana creepy, only using that word for weed that comes from Colombia. He wasn’t sure either if other kinds of marijuana on the street were being sold as creepy.
“Maybe at the time that criminals sell it on the black market, to maybe obtain a greater result by saying that it has greater hallucinogenic power, they invent the name for it, which is creepy. But the truth is, we as police do not utilize any form of marking of ‘creepy’ for marijuana (produced in Chile),” he said. “It is a name that we give it because of the origin where it came from, which is Colombia.”
In recent years, growers in Chile have begun to produce more and more high quality cannabis which has made the ability to buy better quality unadulterated marijuana. At least for those who can afford to.
A Rather Dense Business
Santiago is a city of contrasts. The ritzy areas seem like walking through posh parts of Paris or Los Angeles. The “poblaciones”, rougher low-income neighborhoods scattered around various parts of the city, is where creepy runs wild.
One local dealer, who agreed to be interviewed anonymously by VICE News, sells creepy negro in some of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods.
The dealer said it’s simple why people in the poblaciones continue to smoke creepy rather than the burgeoning indoor market: “more than anything, because of how cheap it is, the price.”
He said he sells grams of the cheap black creepy for a single “luca”— Chilean slang for 1000 pesos, a little more than $1 USD.
But the potency also enticed many, he said, because “the creepy is what gets you, like, ultra-lifted. It leaves you like 10 times higher than natural marijuana.”
He smoked the black creepy often, even though he admitted that the experience isn’t always fun because even he didn’t really know what’s in it, he said. He believed it’s often pressed with toluene (used in paint thinners), alcohol, various substances,” but sometimes “they do it with pasta base (Spanish slang for cocaine paste) so that it's more addictive.”
He can’t know for sure, saying it’s already cut by the time he receives it from Colombians, who are set up in the city.
A second dealer interviewed by VICE News who claimed that he’d been dealing marijuana for roughly a decade, said that he mostly sells the creepy blond because it’s the “purest.”
Although the kilo is a bit more, he can sell the grams for more too, 3,000 pesos or roughly $3.50. Buying the entire kilo wholesale still isn’t expensive, he said, just 12 lucas ($13.75). The black would be even cheaper.
The dealer buys it by the kilo from Colombians based in Chile because “they’re the ones that have the monopoly.”
But he said that he’s not a member of the Colombian gang, only a buyer, because ”I don’t want to bring more problems honestly.”
By most metrics, Chile is not as affected as other Latin American countries like Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras by their connection to organized crime and drug rackets. But other countries in the region who were long considered safer, like Ecuador, have dramatically worsened in recent years, especially after being influenced by Mexican cartels. Ecuador ranked fourth in homicides per capita in Latin American countries in 2022 after Venezuela, Honduras, and Colombia, surpassing Mexico who came in fifth.
Santiago has become more dangerous for dealers as other drugs like cocaine, and more recently, fentanyl, have been pushed by new groups. The name striking fear on the streets now, the dealer said, isn’t Colombian.
“The Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG for its Spanish acronym) has arrived,” he said, referencing the hyperviolent Mexico-based drug trafficking organization. Although the CJNG doesn’t seem particularly interested in creepy, the game’s become more dangerous because groups like that “clearly have a different way of dealing.”
“There will always be conflicts because it is a rather dense business,” he said.
The first dealer, interviewed separately and unconnected to the second, agreed. He said he always carries a gun now. When asked about Mexican drug cartels in Chile, the first dealer immediately ended the interview.
“There are citizens who have been Mexican, who have participated in illicit acts,” said Anti Narcotics chief Guillermo Gálvez, but said that doesn’t mean that there is a “Mexican cartel operating” in Chile. He noted police have found people from various countries involved in drug trafficking in recent years.
Creepy Skull Pain
Before smoking, the most immediate difference between black and blond creepy is their consistency. At first glance, they did not appear entirely peculiar, although the black was certainly darker. The blond was supposedly the traditional Colombian creepy from the heightened THC plant. After busting up each, the blond seemed fairly normal while the black hardly felt like weed, and more like rubber.
Hitting the black creepy is harsh and the high comes on nearly instantaneously, but after 45 or so minutes the effects disappear.
The blond is softer to smoke, but also comes on strong quickly, fading after about an hour and a half. The primary similarity is the immediateness and power of the high, the beginning of the trip that Wolf 707 called the “boom, boom, boom.”
Simón Espinosa, the founder of popular Chilean cannabis news outlet En Volá, said “creepy is not one thing. It's creepy, it can be many things.”
“Like dealers would say anything to sell you whatever you want. So if you're looking for creepy, you're going to find it, because you don't know what you're buying and they don't care. We don't have any compliance,” he said, chuckling. “So of course, ‘you want to have some creepy? It’s right in my pocket.’ It doesn't matter. It's the black market, it’s unregulated.”
Countries across Latin America have considered the legalization of marijuana as a way to combat the rising threat of organized crime, most famously Uruguay who federally legalized the plant in 2013. Chile remains far from federal legalization.
Espinosa said Chile is “a slow country” in terms of passing laws and “that's why we had the riots not long ago, because, like we all knew that education and public health were major topics and nobody did shit about that.”
He said the “only victory, which is a very small victory when you think about it, was quite recently” referencing the passing of legislation less than a year ago that recognizes the right for medical patients to grow and carry cannabis publicly with a medical prescription. “Everything else is illegal.”
But although Espinosa is one of the country’s most renowned cannabis journalists and advocates, he wasn’t sure Chile was ready for federal legalization.
“I don't think that in this country that would generate a positive impact if you don't measure the consequences,” he said. Espinosa noted that while Chile was ranked in the top ten of cannabis consumers per capita in the world, the country also ranked high in a number of other startling categories compared to the rest of South America, like most obese, highest alcohol consumption, and opioid use.
“So that's why I think full scale legalization is not desirable at this moment. Of course, nobody should go to jail for weed. It's a fucking plant. What the fuck? Right. But that's different to making a substance available for a non educated market,” he said. “We are an addicted nation. Chile is the highest consumer of everything.”
Tusi in the Morning, Creepy in the Window
The 32-year-old Wolf 707 has been in the rap game nearly half his life, and been smoking weed even longer. He seemed to agree with Espinosa, noting one of the appeals of creepy: “the strongest possible, Chileans like it.”
To him, weed in Chile already feels somewhat legal, because “the majority of young people consume marijuana here, in the streets, in the poblaciones, everywhere. It's illegal, but in the end it's legal because everyone smokes anyway.”
The word creepy is going to continue to proliferate in the lyrics of Wolf 707 and other artists, he said, because they are just “singing our lives.”
“We rappers always sing about the symbols of what is happening,” he said. “For example, if we’re on creepy, we sing about creepy. If we’re on M, we sing about M.”
Wolf 707 said the game is changing again, and the substance that’s heard more on the streets, and becoming more common in his raps, is the “tusi”—another unknown powdery drug, but basically “a mix of ketamine, mushrooms, everything crazy, M. And they make it in colors, pink or green.”
On the track “Hoodstars”, Wolf 707 psychedelically raps “tusi, Nike, in the morning/smoking creepy in your window/I look at you from afar/and I know when you call me.”
But his passion is always weed, said Wolf 707, admitting he smoked creepy much less as the ability to buy decently priced indoor marijuana grows in Chile. Although sometimes it's outside of the budget so he still smokes creepy because that’s what he can afford, or what’s around. He hopes it's blond, because “the black creepy, the strong one, I’m already giving it up mostly, because I smoke it and it makes me sick.”
Walking to a local subway station near Santiago’s downtown, two young fans selling random trinkets on a blanket on the sidewalk recognize Wolf 707 and ask to take a selfie. Afterward, Wolf 707 sluggishly showed off the nug of weed that the pair gifted him, but it wasn’t creepy.
“Pure indoor,” he said smiling.
