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Today's Most Hilarious Internet Rumor: McDonald's Is Turning Its PlayPlaces into 'Weed Lounges'

Sigh... guys. No.
Photo via Flickr user Mike Mozart / Composite by MUNCHIES Staff

Before you roll a joint and head to the closest McDonald’s, hoping to get blazed where the ball pit used to be, we hope you’ll read this: Despite what one widely shared ‘news’ item insists—and the word news should be read with sarcastic air quotes around it—not a single McDonald’s has turned its children’s play area into a weed-friendly smoking section.

The rumor seems to have started on a site called Now8News, which is filled with the kind of completely fabricated stories that your dumbest high school classmate always shares on Facebook. (Two of its recent headlines read “Dead Body Of Homeless Man Turns Out To Be The Legendary Elvis Presley” and “COLORADO: HUNTER CLAIMS HE WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED BY A SASQUATCH.”) In this unfortunately viral post, the site claims that McDonald’s has plans to convert the Playplaces in 15 Colorado restaurants into toking areas for pot smokers.

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“Each pod not only contains the marijuana smoke within it’s small space, but also it repels the smell of the marijuana through a ventilation tube above the pod,” the site said. “So, although the doors are sealed in this previous ‘Playplace’ location, the smell of marijuana will not seep into the main restaurant as people enter and exit the facility.”

Those are words that people actually believed, and the story has been so widely shared that the Associated Press decided that it needed to be officially debunked. “McDonald’s PlayPlaces aren’t becoming pot places, not even in Colorado, the first state with legal recreational marijuana sales,” the AP’s fact checker wrote, possibly after sighing deeply and wondering what this life has become. In addition, McDonald’s spokesperson Khim Aday told the outlet that the Potplace rumors are “100 percent” not true.

Despite the AP’s input, we’re not convinced that this story won’t come back like one of Now 8 News’ Walmart zombies. It already made its way around the internet in October 2015 and was so prevalent that even Snopes stepped in to stamp it with a fat red FALSE. “While Now8News does not contain a readily available disclaimer, it is a fake news site camouflaged as a local television station news site, and the above-displayed story is a verbatim copy of an article previously published by the disreputable Daily Buzz Live web site,” Snopes wrote.

Although McDonald’s won’t be swapping its slides for toking pods, the fast food giant is still a go-to spot for stoner snacks. According to a study conducted by the Green Market Report, 43 percent of marijuana dispensary customers reported that they had been to a McDonald’s within the past four weeks. "As far as McDonalds, I believe they win out at this point due to sheer size and number of locations," Jeff Stein, vice president of Consumer Research Around Cannabis, told MUNCHIES at the time.

At least we can still stare at the bright colors of those PlayPlaces, imagining what could’ve been.