Kids Get Creative; Find Ways To Get Gigh, Without Getting High

Great headline:

Lewisville teen's hand sanitizer gel sniff 'not a crime'

By WENDY HUNDLEY / The Dallas Morning News

Denton County prosecutors decided Friday to wash their hands of a case against a Lewisville middle school student accused of trying to get high by sniffing his teacher's hand sanitizer.

Three days after filing delinquency charges against the youth, prosecutors did a turnaround and decided that the common cleaning gel is not an abusive inhalant under the Texas Health and Safety Code.

"It's not a crime. Hand sanitizer does not fall within that statute," said Jamie Beck, first assistant district attorney in Denton County. "The police agency brought it up mistakenly thinking it was."

Great. Good to see we take a sane approach to all drugs substances, from hand sanitizers up to heroin. This is the kicker of piece:

Joni Eddy, assistant police chief in Lewisville, said Friday that hand sanitizer has become a popular inhalant. "That is the latest thing to huff," she said.

Really? You're going to try and claim that? You want to try and back that up with any, what's it called...evidence? Maybe some data points or anything? Or have we just caught you in a bold-faced lie, developed to save your own departments ass?

Because to the best of my knowledge there is no such fad. Some small number of mentally deficient kids might be drinking the stuff; but I highly doubt anyone is huffing hand sanitizer to get high. I pay close enough attention to the ONDCP and their media machine and if there was even the slightest amount of data indicating that some kid somewhere was huffing hand sanitizer, I would have read about it in a press release warning the pubic about the latest epidemic -- Purell.

A spokeswomen for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said in the same article that they have "no data about hand sanitizers being abused as inhalants". A simple googling, along with a few deep huffs of my own Purell backed up the claim.

Full article here.