Token sucking and the MTA's chili powder fix
How subway thieves sucked tokens from turnstiles, and why the MTA fought back with chili powder.
For fifty years, riding the subway meant carrying a small brass token, and for a stretch of the 1980s and 90s that token turned every turnstile into a potential crime scene. The method was as simple as it was stomach-turning: jam the slot, wait for a rider to give up on a stuck turnstile and walk away, then suck the wedged token out with your mouth. Transit workers had a blunt name for it, token sucking, and for a while the Transit Authority genuinely tried to fight it with chili powder.
The token era is long gone, replaced first by the MetroCard and now by tap-to-pay, but the stations from that era are the same ones you can explore today. If you want to see how the network these turnstiles guarded actually fits together, the NYC subway game and the station and line explorer cover the current map end to end.
How the scam actually worked
The mechanics were low-tech and depressingly effective. Someone would wedge a gum wrapper, a scrap of paper, or a matchbook into a turnstile's token slot so it wouldn't accept a coin cleanly. A commuter would drop in a token, feel the turnstile refuse to turn, bang on it in frustration, and give up and use another turnstile or another entrance. Once the rider was gone, the person who'd rigged the slot came back, sealed their lips over it, and inhaled hard enough to pull the lodged token free. According to Gothamist, some of the more prolific practitioners were pulling in as much as $50 worth of tokens a day this way, token by token, at 90 cents to a dollar fifty each depending on the year.
It was disgusting enough that even hardened transit cops singled it out. Gothamist quotes Transit Authority official Hugh Dunne telling the New York Times back in 1983 that police radio calls about the practice were a near-daily occurrence, and by the 1990s a huge share of turnstile repair calls, well over half of a system logging thousands of them a week, traced back to deliberately jammed slots rather than ordinary wear.
Chili powder, mace, and a bucket of water
Facing a system-wide plague of stuffed turnstiles, station agents and the Transit Authority tried a genuinely folk-remedy fix: sprinkling chili powder or cayenne pepper directly into the token slots, on the theory that a mouth pressed against a slot coated in capsaicin would think twice. Gothamist and the Smithsonian Magazine both describe it as one of a handful of improvised deterrents from the era, alongside officers dusting slots with Mace and then watching the crowd for anyone walking around with suspiciously red, irritated lips.
None of it held up for long. The chili powder trick in particular had an obvious workaround: perpetrators started showing up with buckets of water, rinsing the pepper out of the slot before going back to work, and according to Gothamist's reporting some even threw the leftover water at the token clerk on their way out. Transit workers also tried super-strength glue and other slot-jamming countermeasures over the same stretch, but the pattern kept repeating: a fix would slow things down for a season, then the workaround would catch up.
Part of a bigger token-era crime wave
Token sucking didn't happen in isolation. It was one symptom of a subway system in the 1980s that was also dealing with heavy graffiti, deferred maintenance, and a broader fare-beating culture that included turnstile jumping and, memorably, a black market in cheaper look-alike tokens. The Smithsonian Magazine piece on subway secrets notes that Connecticut Turnpike tokens were nearly identical in size and shape to New York's and cost less, which touched off what transit officials only half-jokingly called the Great Token War before the two agencies settled the mismatch. Against that backdrop, a clerk shaking cayenne pepper into a slot reads less like an isolated eccentricity and more like one small skirmish in a system-wide fight against fare theft.
How the whole cat-and-mouse game ended
What finally beat token sucking wasn't a better deterrent, it was making the token itself obsolete. The MTA began rolling out the MetroCard in 1994, and over the following decade tokens were phased out of daily use. Per Gotham Gazette's history of the token, sales stopped at midnight on April 12, 2003, tokens were discontinued outright when the fare rose to $2 that May 4, and buses kept accepting them only through the end of that year. Ephemeral New York puts it plainly: once there was no coin-shaped object sitting in a slot waiting to be jammed, there was nothing left to suck out, and a genuinely bizarre chapter of subway crime simply stopped being possible.
Questions people actually ask
What exactly was token sucking?
A fare-theft method where someone jammed a turnstile's token slot with paper or a wrapper, waited for a rider to give up on the stuck turnstile and leave, then sucked the lodged token out with their mouth.
Did the MTA really use chili powder against it?
Yes. Booth clerks and the Transit Authority sprinkled chili powder or cayenne pepper into frequently jammed slots as a deterrent, mostly in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, though according to Gothamist people simply washed it out with water before continuing.
When did token sucking peak?
Reporting on the practice traces back at least to the early 1980s, with a Transit Authority official describing near-daily police radio calls about it in 1983, and it stayed a persistent problem into the 1990s.
What ended token sucking for good?
The token itself disappearing. The MetroCard rolled out starting in 1994, token sales stopped in April 2003, and tokens were fully retired that May, which removed the coin that made the whole scheme possible.
Where can I see the stations these turnstiles used to guard?
The NYC subway network explorer covers every current line and station, and the NYC guessing game is a fast way to learn where they all sit on the map.