The 5 Most Stoned South Park Episodes Ever

The five most drug-soaked South Park episodes are “Major Boobage,” “Medicinal Fried Chicken,” “Crippled Summer,” “Tegridy Farms” and “The Pandemic Special.” South Park built its legend on crude animation and, above all, on storylines that lean hard into risk, political incorrectness and sheer brutality — which is how it earned a permanent spot among the most acclaimed and unhinged animated shows on TV, where it's stayed for more than 20 years.

Created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the show (at least its starting point) follows four elementary school kids — Stan, Kyle, Eric and Kenny — in the small mountain town of South Park, Colorado, as they stumble through adventures full of foul language and not-so-tragic deaths alongside classmates, friends and family. From there, things spiral into pure insanity. Needless to say, not for kids.

Out of its endless catalog of episodes, this time we're zeroing in on the ones that are specifically about drugs.

Major Boobage

When it comes to straight-up movie tributes, “Major Boobage” is the one. It riffs on the cult Canadian film Heavy Metal, one of the masterpieces of adult animation, and it's one of the best South Park episodes ever, because it runs through the whole list: sniffing glue, chugging cough syrup, huffing paint, choking games. All of it pales next to the new way to get wasted.

In this one, the kids start getting high on male cat urine, a drug that sends them on wild trips. “Apparently it causes a euphoric state known as 'cheesing.' Why 'cheesing'? Because it smells like fondue,” explains the local news.

By the end, cats get labeled “deadly animals,” and the boys try to pull Kenny out of his new addiction: chasing the busty heroines of his medieval fantasy world in the middle of a full-on psychedelic trip.

Medicinal Fried Chicken

Not everybody's a sports fan, so Cartman fakes a stomachache to get out of soccer practice. It looks like he's going to pull it off without a hitch, but everything changes with what comes next: after practice, the kids always go eat together at KFC.

Except Cartman's favorite fried chicken joint has closed down, and a medical marijuana dispensary has opened in its place. Thanks to the state's new laws, Randy is tempted to try weed, but the guy behind the counter shuts him down: “You need a prescription from your doctor.”

Determined to get his hands on some herb despite being in perfect health, Randy microwaves his own testicles to give himself cancer so he can qualify for medical cannabis.

There are nods to Scarface, plus one of the grossest and most iconic images in TV history: Randy bouncing down the street on his own giant balls.

Crippled Summer

The boys' old pal Towelie is back, and he's in deep: he's gone from smoking weed to heroin, meth and crack.

Desperate to score and pay for his fix, he starts stealing from everyone and turning tricks with older men for drug money.

It doesn't go well, and Towelie is buried in debt. To help, the boys land him a job at a summer camp for kids with disabilities (where, obviously, Jimmy steals the show as usual). Once he's there, things only get worse: in the middle of withdrawal, Towelie ends up huffing canned air.

The episode is told as a reality-TV “intervention” show, which makes “Crippled Summer” one of the rawest and, yes, saddest episodes of the whole series.

Tegridy Farms

Sweet Butters is known for his usual innocence, which comes in handy in all sorts of ways. This time he gets into selling vapes, and he's so good at it that even kindergartners start hitting cherry, lemon and raspberry nicotine e-cigs.

Meanwhile Randy, in one of his many impulsive moves (as usual), decides it's time to “start over and get back to simpler times.” So the Marshes move to a farm to try their hand at agriculture.

They put the house up for sale, pack their stuff and move out to the countryside in Colorado. That's no accident: Colorado was one of the first two states to legalize recreational marijuana in the US.

And since weed is legal, Randy starts growing organic cannabis, which quickly becomes his new obsession. His product gets the seal of approval from Towelie, the biggest stoner on the show, so what could possibly go wrong?

The Pandemic Special

“The Pandemic Special” is one of those episodes that pushes every viewer's moral buttons, provokes by sticking close to reality and gets trippier than ever.

Taking on the real-life chaos of COVID and the economic crisis that followed, the episode finds Randy still running his medical marijuana farm. And while the whole economy falls apart and death literally stalks South Park, Randy seems to know exactly what he's doing, because suddenly everyone wants his “medicine.”

The coronavirus haunts every scene like a ghost, showing up in dark jokes until the episode lands on the most uncomfortable truths: cops running the school, mass panic, nobody with a cure, and the cartels posting “closed due to COVID.”

And in the middle of all that madness, scientists track down the origin of the pandemic: first a bat, then a pangolin. How did the virus mutate to jump from those critters to humans? Did Randy have something to do with it? And what's with the suspicious little mustache people sprout after smoking his joints?