Tiffany Haddish is a pretty good actress, best known for her role on the critically acclaimed but low-rated The Carmichael Show. What she’s not is a doctor, or even a person who should be dispensing medical advice. Of course, that didn’t stop her from telling GQ we should all drink turpentine for our health.
“A teaspoon of turpentine will not kill you,” says Haddish with the breezy confidence of an unlicensed doctor. “The government doesn’t want you to know that if you have a cold, just take some turpentine with some sugar or castor oil or honey and it’ll go away the next day.”
I mean, she has a point. if you drink turpentine, you will not have a cold the next day. Aresnic would work, too, because the reason your cold will subside is that you’ll be dead. Because turpentine is poison.
But don’t worry about that, because according to not-Doctor Haddish, the poison isn’t going to kill you, it’s going to kill someone else.
“There’s worms inside your body,” says Haddish.
The f**k? This is not okay. That was episode of Futurama, Tiffany, and the worms were beneficial. Fry just got rid of them because he wanted to make sure Leela loved him for who he really was. I can see why you got confused, you saw the episode while you were poisoned from drinking turpentine.
Of course, GQ’s Caity Weaver wasn’t going to leave this unchallenged, because she’s a decent human being and there’s a moral obligation to tell someone they’re going to kill themselves if they keep drinking turpentine like a crazy person.
I do look it up, because I’m genuinely worried America’s brightest new star may be inadvertently poisoning herself to death. I send Haddish information from the U.S. National Library of Medicine outlining the dangers of turpentine poisoning, but when we talk again a few days after our whale watch, she is unconcerned. “The government wrote it,” she says of the research. “Honey.”
The good news for Haddish is that if Oprah runs for president, she’s basically got the position of Surgeon General on lock.