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Was it only a month or soago that news outlets around the country were breathlessly
reporting that today’s teens were getting whacked-out
on hand sanitizer?
As the
Los Angeles Times told the tale (and USA
Today
reprised it), “Six teenagers have shown up in two San Fernando
Valley emergency rooms in the last few months with alcohol
poisoning after drinking hand sanitizer.”
If that’s not enough for anxious parents to order sub-dermal
tracker chips to place under their kids’ skin, chew on this: “Some
of the teens used salt to separate the alcohol from the sanitizer,
making a potent drink similar to a shot of hard liquor.
Distillation instructions can be found on the Internet.”
Don’t you dare think just because no one is actually doing
something that it’s not about to become the next big thing:
“Although there’s only been a few cases, county public health
toxicology expert Cyrus Rangan says it could signal a dangerous
trend.”
The hand-sanitizer story is a classic of the particularly
powerful news narrative that might be called “The Kids These Days”
story. The recipe is as simple as it is intoxicating: Take kids, a
wholesome product or activity (cleanser, say, or a sleepover),
throw in drugs, booze, or sex (preferably all three), some form of
vaguely scary technology (teh Interwebz, cell phones), and shake
vigorously (like Mentos in a 2 liter bottle of Pepsi, or maybe Pop
Rocks with a Coca-Cola chaser), and let it rip!
While we await the next fake news trend about teens and sex and
drugs—and
the coming federal ban on so-called bath salts and fake
marijuana—here are five classic freakouts to contemplate.
Next: Oooh, oooh, that smell (no, not that
one)…
5. Jenkem: Choice of aNew Generation
In 2007, the Sheriff’s Office of Collier County, Florida
perpetrated one of the most ridiculous frauds in the annals of
police work when it reported that kids were getting turned on by a
“new drug called ‘Jenkem,’” which was made from fermented urine and
feces. Sure, kids today are into do-it-yourself culture, but given
that real drugs are reportedly easier to score than ever, who
exactly would be into what the cops averred was known by slang
terms such as “butthash” and “fruit from crack pipe”?
From
the advisory:
The fecal matter and urine are placed in a bottle or jar and
covered most commonly with a balloon. The container is then placed
in a sunny area for several hours or days until fermented. The
contents of the container will separate and release a gas, which is
captured in the balloon. Inhaling the gas is said to have a
euphoric high similar to ingesting cocaine but with strong
hallucinations of times past.
The rumor-busting site Snopes.com, the authoritative guide to
such things, has ruled that
reports of Jenkem being “a popular drug in American schools”
are false.
Next: And That’s No Choke!…
4. The Choking Game:
Fun For All Ages
If you’ve got kids—or are just
a big David Carradine fan—you’ve probably read reports over the
years about something called “the choking game.” As National Public
Radio
reported just last month, the choking game revolves around kids
strangling themselves or each other until they pass out or
almost-pass out. The rush is supposed to be pretty awesome, if it
doesn’t kill you. But like most freakouts about juvenile behavior,
nobody really has good data on the ubiquity of the activity. All we
know for sure is that it’s happening everywhere, all the time:
According to a study…published…in
the journal Pediatrics, around 6 percent of more than
5,000 middle-schoolers surveyed in Portland, Ore., have tried the
choking game. And about a quarter of them have tried it at least
five times, the researchers reported.
Then again:
…no one really knows how often the game is being played or how
many kids may have died. Back in 2008, a national
estimate put the death toll from the choking game at about
82 between 1995 and 2007. But the study relied on media reports
that couldn’t be verified independently. And many deaths that
weren’t reported in the news could have been missed.
The important thing is to remember, as the NPR headline puts it,
“Deadly
‘Choking Game’ Comes With Big Risks” (the biggest risk, I’m
guessing, is that it’s deadly, right?).
The more prurient twist on the choking game stresses that
“researchers said that students who had ever had sex and had used
drugs in the last 30 days were at increased risk for participating
in the choking game.” Of course they were, if only because
drug-taking, sexually active kids are more likely to sell
newspapers and capture eyeballs.
Erotic asphyxiation’s siren call is hardly confined to sweet
youth. In 2009, 72-year-old actor David Carradine’s
“mysterious” death was attributed to a one-handed version of
the choking game, as the star of Kill Bill and Kung
Fu was found dead in a Thai hotel room closet with ropes
around his neck and genitals. (What exactly was mysterious
about such a death went unexplained in most news accounts.)
Next: It’s Always The Time of the Month for Vodka-Soaked
Tampons!…
3. Butt-Chugging:
Works Every Time
Late last year, a Phoenix-area cop named Chris Thomas turned the
public on to the twin threats of tampons soaked with booze and
“butt-chugging,” or inserting
beer bongs rectally:
“What we’re hearing about is teenagers utilizing tampons, soak
them in vodka first before using them,” Thomas said.
“It gets absorbed directly into the bloodstream. There’s no
barrier, there’s no stomach acid to prevent it,” Thomas
said….
“This is definitely not just girls,” Thomas said. “Guys will
also use it and they’ll insert it into their rectums.”
And that’s not all.
“Using a beer bong rectally is the same concept as a vodka
soaked tampon,” Thomas said.
As Reason’s Jacob Sullum
pointed out, rumors about butt-chugging and vodka-soaked
tampons have been published all over the world. The locale and
liquor vary, but all the accounts share an absolute lack of
veracity and an unsurmountable challenge posed by basic human
anatomy and sanitary napkins. That point was driven home by the
detailed attempt of Huffington Post Canada editor Danielle
Crittenden to get a buzz off a 120 proof tampon.
Snopes.com had
originally listed the truth status of the butt-chugging and
tampon stories as “undetermined,” but more recently ruled them as
“false.”
Next: It’s My Party and I’ll Lie If I Want
To….
2. Rainbow Parties: The Ultimate Oral
Tradition
Only parents raised on Penthouse Forum letters could have come
up with the idea of a “Rainbow Party,” in which young girls (the
younger the better!) wear different shades of brightly colored
lipstick and successively perform oral sex on a boy, leaving a
ROYGBIV spectrum of colors on his penis.
As Cathy Young pointed out in her 2006 Reason story, “The
Great Fellatio Scare,” the basic mechanics of oral sex undercut
the notion almost as much as the absolute lack of evidence that any
such gathering has ever happened anywhere outside of the fevered
imaginations of grownups writing poorly sourced stories for the
Washington Post and other mainstream news outlets.
From Young’s piece:
In 2003, this peril was explored by Oprah herself, with the help
of O magazine feature writer Michelle Burford,
who interviewed 50 girls, some as young as 9, and painted a
frightening picture of kiddie debauchery. “Are rainbow parties
pretty common?” inquired a rapt Oprah, to which Burford replied, “I
think so. At least among the 50 girls that I talked to…this was
pervasive.”
Unless pervasive is tween-talk for bullshit—or
maybe Jenkem—Rainbow Parties seem about as real as
unicorns.
Next: Blinded By the Light, The Pretty, Pretty
Light…
1. LSD: Turn On, Tune
In, Drop Dead
The Don Quixote of “The Kids These Days” narrative may
well be the story of college kids high on LSD who stared at the sun
so long they blinded themselves.
As
Snopes.com recounts it, in May 1967, The Los Angeles
Times—most recently seen uncritically reporting on the Great
Hand-Sanitizer Hooch Epidemic of 2012—published a story about four
tripping Santa Barbara college students who “suffer[ed] serious eye
damage” after spending hours staring at the sun.
Snopes points out all the earmarks of a hoax: None of the kids
is named and neither is the “spokesman for the Santa Barbara
Opthalmological Society,” the doctor quoted in the story, or even
the writer of the piece. Which is pretty much all you need to know
about the story.
“The LSD horror story,” writes Snopes, “was picked up by the
Associated Press and quickly spread all over the U.S., appearing in
such prominent news publications…as The New York Times
and Time magazine.” Better yet, only eight months later,
The LA Times experienced a sort of editorial
flashback: The paper published an almost identical story written by
the AP and set in Pennsylvania.
What is it the newspaper guy says
at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? “When
the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Especially if you’re talking about kids, sex, and drugs.
Nick Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.com and
Reason.tv and co-author of The Declaration of Independents: How
Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America, which will
be published in paperback with a new introduction on June 26.
Go here to order your copy.
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