Sunday, December 20, 2009

Kids Just Want To Get Drunk

Kids Just Want To Get Drunk

During this festive time of year when excess is in style, in shopping and eating it's hard to forget the main one.. Drinking. It's the season that you get the most public service announcements to curb drunk driving. Especially if it's a little wet out, holiday celebrating can lead to you wrapped around a telephone pole.

It's a big deal to discourage that heavy amount of drinking but for one reason or another, it happens. Maybe it's because the days are shorter and it gets darker sooner. Which means you can go out for those Happy hour drinks and continue on to the night life or whatever. One important lesson here is that with all the gift giving of booze and the vast amount of alcohol offered, it makes it easier for kids to get a hold of that and indulge themselves.. sadly though, today's youth isn't smart enough for that sort of thing.

No no. The kids are not alright. In their effort to find new and funny ways to get fucked up, they've found new things to number the sense and this isn't your grand dad's moonshine...
The best way to drink hand sanitizer is straight, like whisky, and down it “like a shot,” explains Tyler, a Grade 10 student who lives in Toronto. Undiluted, the alcohol-based liquid tastes a little like “vodka and bug spray,” he adds.

The alarming comment from the 15-year-old mirrors a growing number of news reports about teenagers and children drinking the antiseptic hand-cleaning products. Most hand sanitizers have an alcoholic content between 60 and 90 per cent, which means that even small amounts have led to a number of cases of alcohol poisoning in younger children. That percentage is much higher than even that of most hard liquors, giving it an appeal to kids looking for a quick high, explains Jane Wells, a drama teacher at Toronto’s after-school Care Program. Wells has come to know a lot about this subject: she discovered that a group of eight- and nine-year-olds drank hand sanitizer at school just before she took them on a school walk. When she noticed them acting strange and giggling, they first told her they had been drinking alcohol, but after some probing, confessed it was really the hand cleaner. They told her they’d been enticed by the promise of alcohol “right on the bottle,” she says.

This kind of situation creates a problem for schools. The liquid, jokingly called “booze ooze” on parenting blogs, is one of the best defences against H1N1 and other colds and flus, says Jonathan Kerr, a Belleville, Ont.-based family doctor and member of the board of directors for the Ontario College of Family Physicians. But with reports of children drinking it or setting it alight (it’s flammable), Kerr says, schools face an “interesting dilemma.”

A number of Canadian schools have banned alcohol-based hand sanitizer from the premises. In some schools in Cape Breton, it isn’t allowed in the classroom, and provided to children only when there isn’t soap and water. Parents are discouraged from giving bottles to kids, although it’s not confiscated unless it “causes problems” at school, explains Ambrose White, director of operational services for the Cape Breton-Victoria school board. Lee County schools in Florida initially banned the substance, but then relented last month because of the threat of swine flu. Winnipeg schools won’t use the alcohol-based kind for safety reasons, but have introduced non-alcohol-based sanitizers, which are about as effective, according to studies, but can be more expensive.

Ossington/Old Orchard Junior Public School in Toronto allows kids to use it in the classroom, but the bottles are kept under close scrutiny on the teacher’s desk or within eyesight. “Teachers have control over it,” says someone who works at the school but did not want their name used. Kids are allowed to use it, but they are watched “as they squirt so they don’t lick it.”

The preference among kids who have tried it, according to an informal poll done by Maclean’s, is to drink hand sanitizer straight. It dries out the throat, and tastes bitter and foul—in short, nothing like the fruity flavours it promises, such as warm vanilla sugar, Japanese cherry blossom, coconut lime verbena, cucumber melon, midnight pomegranate and nectarine mint. These not only sound enticing, they come in “pretty bottles” that are seductive to young children, explains Christine Crosby, a grandmother who publishes Grand, an online magazine about grandparenting. Crosby, who has two grandchildren aged five and eight, is hyper-vigilant around the product—she’s heard of children being rushed to hospital with alcohol poisoning after taking a swig. “It’s everywhere at the moment,” she says, “and it can be scary.”

Eighteen-year-old Kyle, who did not want his last name used, lives in Barrie, Ont. He drank strawberry-flavoured hand sanitizer on a dare at a party, but he draws the line at sniffing, because it would “burn your nose right out.” That’s not to say it isn’t done: online footage of kids sniffing hand sanitizer makes it look painful. But it might be more common than its enjoyment factor would suggest: a Texas teen was accused of sniffing the hand sanitizer to “induce a condition of intoxication, hallucination and elation,” according to a Denton County court petition. The charges were dropped because hand sanitizer is not an abusive inhalant under the Texas Health and Safety Code. His father, Richard Ortiz, claimed his son sniffed only because he liked the smell.

Having had one scare already, Wells is extra careful and vigilant with it now around her students. “It’s worrying,” she says. “You are loath to say ‘Don’t drink that!’ because they might not have thought of it until you said it.”
So yeah, lets not discuss the idea of proper drug education or anything like that. Lets not discuss that non-alcohol based sanitizers increase bacterial/viral resistance, because alcohol is just great at destroying cell walls. Nope, lets just call it the NEW HIGH! Wooooo hoooo. Don't tell the crack heads or they'll all have sanitized hands when asking for change.

I know, another day, another moral panic. I've been seeing the sanitizers in schools more and I wondered when someone would get the "clever" idea of drinking it. I hoped they like going blind. Most of the other chemicals in that stuff are quite dangerous. Then again, I bet maybe only 20 children have done this ever and it's literally the biggest non-issue in the world. I mean, really, a kid somewhere found a way to get fucked up! Call in the news! I welcome you to the wonderfully strange world of Jenkem



I guess we should let them do it. Hopefully they'll kill themselves and they wont be able to pass on their retarded genes. Especially with all the yellow 7 in the Mt. Dew making them sterile. What the fuck kinda kids can't buy weed or steal some real liquor these days? How about the slew of medical drugs that other kids are getting. Xanax, ritulin and Aderall are actually the really widespread shit and it's easy as hell to buy in high school these days. But no one wants to focus on the prescription drugs freely available because that's the parents fault.

If you asked the teachers, they'd probably say that when they were kids they expected us to have some uber-awesome technology that we could just wave our hands under to sanitize them instantly. Something like a UV hand sanitizer. Than again, something that powerful in killing germs would more than likely work the same way as a microwave and melt our skin off. But that's besides the point, ask any teacher and they'll tell you they fear germs the most since they're right there in the front lines of seeing all the ugly germs that the kids bring in on a daily basis. Maybe someone should invent a safe one of those. But nah, let's just buy the cheapest thing we can and fill up the landfills with those gel containers that we use constantly.



Let's just focus on the way kids are getting shit faced on hand cleaners and not touch on the subject that hand sanitizers in schools is a ludicrous over-reaction and that we managed not to have them for most of the 20th century without vast amount of children dying. There's no need for them at all. If there's an outbreak of a particularly nasty disease you should just close the school instead of farting around with antiseptic sprays. Most advanced nations have medical systems that don't over-prescribe antibiotics/viral, that encourage bed rest, and sometimes even given orders to not go in to school/work as to prevent spread.

I do have to wonder where on the moral panic meter this all falls in comparison to the choking game and the rainbow parties. Cause this is some serious wino shit these kids are doing. Back in my day we'd find vacant houses with HVAC systems, cut the hoses and huff the freon. Why aren't these kids getting creative like my generation? We used to drink Vanilla essence in high school. Back then Vanilla essence was about 70% alcohol and some vanilla.. I guess. But it would be perfectly legal to buy and at lunch they would down it mixed with milk. People would get all smashed but just smell like someones OD'd on milk shakes from the canteen.



People idealize childhood but 90% of it is being bored as shit, wishing you could get fucked up somehow. It's the sad reality. This is more reason to legalize weed for children. At least that would be some justification for creating games like where girls give you blow jobs if you tug on the right color bracelet or want to collect different color lipsticks on your cock. Damn, couple that with the drug dealers handing out freebies, I think I want to go back to school!

You know you don't need antibacterial goop to prevent the spread of disease. Just wash your goddamn hands with bar soap. Just running water eliminates like 98% of germs. At least according to Bill Nye. Be smart and use those purell bottle for other things. I used to fill them up with everclear and sneak alcohol into concerts and movies.



If anything, we should get rid of those hand sanitizers would be to get these kids to be more creative. Kids need to learn how to make moonshine. No, Moonshine will not make you blind or kill you. That's just a myth created by the big businesses. You do realize that the real reason moonshine is illegal is NOT because you can accidentally make it toxic and kill your friends/family. It's because it's relatively easy to make in commercial quantities therefore easy to dodge taxation. Much like Tobacco. Both are easy to dodge taxation. Making moonshine is pretty damn easy and safe.

Methanol is a product of all fermentations, and is not naturally produced in any quantity in the making of beer or wine to harm anyone, even if stupidly distilled. You can only get it by fermenting sawdust, or something equally retarded. Similarly, distillation, if done using proper methods and not a car radiator, purifies alcohol. Methanol boils off at a different temperature than ethanol, and can easily be discarded. Everything you've heard about moonshine is literally the remnant of unscrupulous bootleggers from prohibition, and the resulting propaganda campaign from the government. Read up on the whiskey rebellion sometime.



Anyway, that's distillation. We're talking about home brewing, which has been done for centuries and has never killed anyone because no pathogen can ever grow in beer or wine. You can make beer/wine without any dangers. Even hard cider is as tame as a kitten. Take apple juice, add yeast, let sit. Simple as that. You can make it in a bucket. It really is that easy. If you want to get one of those Mr. beers makers, I have never been carded getting one of those and in four weeks, you can have your own beer.

The whiskey rebellion is a nice example of how every US president was a bourgie peice of shit. Hamilton got Washington to pass an excise tax on corn likker, which was big in the mountain south as a cash crop (turn left over corn into likker, haul into town, sell for fun and profit). It was also regressive, so that small producers paid a whole shitload more than big producers, who got a bulk rate. Guess who was a big producer of corn likker? That's right, George Washington.



So the hillbillies got real mad at this and got to revoltin', George continues to be a douche bag and sics the national guard on them. They all head west into the unspoiled wilderness of what would become Kentucky and Tennessee, and thus that is the home of whiskey in the US.

You can still find moonshiners all over the mountain parts of SC, NC and WV/VA though. Corn likker's pretty tasty but I recommend against white lightnin, which is literally just fermented sugar water. That shit's real bad. In the end it's all easy to do but it's mad illegal and the ATF will literally take your house if they catch you. So just be careful if you're going to start a distillery.



For all the children reading this thread at home. Do not drink hand-sanitizer. Use fucking soap, shit heads. I should just leave you with this final note, teenagers of today. You have much more flexible bodies. Enjoy them while it lasts.

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