Whoa, like parents need anything else to worry about, now teens are drinking hand sanitizer as a substitute for alcohol. Unlike alcoholic beverages, hand sanitizer is readily available to the general population; in fact, we’ve been throwing it at our children since birth.
There is a new trend in which teens are drinking the 120-proof hand sanitizer to get the same high you achieve from drinking alcohol. To give a little perspective, vodka is only 80-proof. So why drink hand sanitizer? Probably for the same reason that I had friends in high school who drank Formula 44-D and Robitussin like it was chocolate milk, it’s cheap, it’s effective and most kids can get their hands on it at home, school or in any public place.
In a society obsessed with not spreading germs, we are now providing the very drug that may kill our children.
We’ve always known that we needed to keep the hand sanitizer out of the hands of our toddlers so that they didn’t accidentally get alcohol poisoning and kill themselves by drinking the hand sanitizer.
Now, we have to worry about our tweens and teens killing themselves because they stole the hand sanitizer out of our purse, went behind the house to drink it and overdosed trying to get drunk.
I think maybe we should all consider going back to soap and water to clean hands and prevent the spread of germs. As a tween, a smart mouth caused me to spend a lot of time with soap in my mouth (yes, just like Ralphie from a Christmas Story) and I didn’t overdose or die so I think we should scrap the hand sanitizer all together and save ourselves the heartache of having our children overdose and die.
Looks like the hand sanitizer will have to start getting locked up in the liquor cabinet with the rest of the alcohol.
What do you think about kids drinking hand sanitizer to get drunk?
Photo Credit: Mr.T
