Six Teenagers Got Drunk Off Of Hand Sanitizer? Then All Of Ten Are Doing The Same Thing!

Remember the freak out over teens soaking tampons in vodka to get drunk? Or how about the freak out over teens supposedly doing rectal beer bongs? It seems there’s an endless array of activities a handful of teens can perform to get drunk that adults around the country use as an excuse to fabricate moral panics and make everyone believe their kid is a raging alcoholic whose thirst for booze knows no bounds of logic and reason.

Enter hand sanitizer.

Six teens in California were taking to the hospital due to alcohol posing. Turns out these kids had devised a way to separate the alcohol in hand sanitizer using common table salt. They then used this alcohol to get drunk.

If news agencies weren’t so concerned with making up panics, the reporting of this story would be more about how these kids used a clever tactic to do something stupid. But we don’t live in that world. What sells is panic, so instead the story is about how something these six kids did will grow in popularity and inspire other kids to weed out their DNA from the collective gene pool.

The following excerpt is taken from the Los Angeles Times. See if you can spot the points where the story goes from informative to “EVERYBODY PANIC!!”:

Six teenagers have shown up in two San Fernando Valley emergency rooms in the last few months with alcohol poisoning after drinking hand sanitizer, worrying public health officials who say the cases could signal a dangerous trend.

Some of the teenagers used salt to separate the alcohol from the sanitizer, making a potent drink that is similar to a shot of hard liquor.
“All it takes is just a few swallows and you have a drunk teenager,” said Cyrus Rangan, director of the toxicology bureau for the county public health department and a medical toxicology consultant for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “There is no question that it is dangerous.”

Although there have been only a handful of cases, Rangan said the practice could easily become a larger problem. Bottles of hand sanitizer are inexpensive and accessible, and teenagers can find distillation instructions on the Internet.

Did you see implication of mass panic pop up randomly, apropos to nothing? Let me point them out:

Six teenagers have shown up in two San Fernando Valley emergency rooms in the last few months with alcohol poisoning after drinking hand sanitizer, worrying public health officials who say the cases could signal a dangerous trend.

And…

Although there have been only a handful of cases, Rangan said the practice could easily become a larger problem. Bottles of hand sanitizer are inexpensive and accessible, and teenagers can find distillation instructions on the Internet.

The use of the comma here is very telling. Before the commas we are given nothing but facts. The writer of the article then uses the space generated by the comma to make you think your son or daughter is going clean out their insides with hand sanitizer because you don’t keep a well-stocked liquor cabinet.

Parents, adults, please, calm the fuck down. Just because six assholes did a stupid thing doesn’t mean your kid will do the same…unless you’re certain you’ve raised an idiot.