I often paste verbatim text into the lab notebook I keep with org-mode.
Org-mode always interprets any line that begins with an asterisk as a
headline, even when the line is surrounded by #+BEGIN_... and #+END_...
patterns. This breaks org-special-edit, making it complain, "No special
environment to edit here", unless I manually insert another character at
the beginning of every line in the block that begins with an asterisk.

The behavior surprised me.  I found two ways to work around it.  First, I
can edit the would-be verbatim text as described above. It will always look
like the original text in org-special-edit. That's marginally acceptable
because it alters my original text and makes me take one more step before I
can copy and paste it elsewhere.  Second, I can put such text in a drawer.
I discovered that org-mode does not mis-interpret my text in a drawer.


Here is an example.  It's markdown text.  I use #+{BEGIN,END}_EXAMPLE but
this behavior occurs in all of the #+BEGIN_.. and #+END_... patterns.

#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
This is the README.md for rfc-tools, a collection of programs for
processing IETF RFCs.

* fetch-rfcs-by-title.sh downloads into the current directory the RFCs
   whose titles contain the string given on the command line.  Uses an
  rfc-index file in the current directory.  Prefers the PDF version of
  RFCs but will obtain the text version if the PDF is not available.

* fetch-sip-rfcs.sh downloads RFCs that contain "Session Initiation"
  in their titles into the current directory.

* search-rfc-index.sh searches an rfc-index file in the current
  directory for the string given on the command line.  The string can
  contain spaces.

* join-titles.awk turns the contents of an rfc-index file into a
  series of long lines.  Each line begins with the RFC number, then a
  space, then the rest of the entry from the rfc-index.
#+END_EXAMPLE