Teens are Drinking Hand Sanitizer to get Drunk

I was just watching the news. I have heard of teenagers, huffing paint, doing whip-its, which is with whipped cream cans, sniffing rubber cement, inhaling duster among other things while are all extremely dangerous. Now teenagers are drinking hand sanitizer.  I think that is disgusting. Hand Sanitizer is mostly ethanol alcohol so I guess they drink it to get drunk. It ends up having a really high proof, since the proof is the alcohol volume percentage times two. I think that is so sad, that kids feel that they need to get drunk so bad that they are drinking hand sanitizer.  Are they going to start making it hard to purchase? Of course a teen can walk in to the store and buy a bottle of hand sanitizer and the cashier will think nothing of it. Now, I am not sure why anyone would wanna drink it, have you smelled it? I have accidentally tasted hand sanitizer from using it and then eating and it is nasty.  It makes me so sad that kids will find any way they can to get high, or drunk without understanding the consequences.

I am not sure who gets the idea of doing these things. I know I grew up with Mr. Yuk and I know you aren’t supposed to drink things that aren’t drinks. I grew up knowing that there are poisons out there that will harm me and I learned not to drink things that are just handed to me. You don’t know what harm they can do. You don’t know if you will die.  You never know. Today, Noah and I were pretending his lamb was sick, so I gave him some imaginary medicine to give to her, well he ate it. I took the opportunity to tell him how you never take anyone else’s medicine; you only take medicine given to you by mommy or a doctor.  We have been talking about it a lot because he keeps asking for higher doses of Tylenol when he has a fever.

When I was 17, I met this girl who huffed rubber cement when she was 14 with her best friend. They went on a hayride that night, came back to one of the girls houses and huffed rubber cement and went to sleep, in the morning her best friend was dead. This is a very true and very sad story. No high or getting drunk is worth dying for or causing serious bodily harm.

Please talk to your children about the dangers of drinking hand sanitizer.