Click here to see my cartoon on this topic.
Hand sanitizers like Germ-X are wonderful inventions. We can have clean hands and not dry them out with cheap soap. However, there is a developing issue surrounding this little marvel; kids are beginning to use it for a high. If you take a quick sniff, it has a very pleasant aroma. However, it is 62% ethyl alcohol. The warnings on the back, among other things, actually read, “Do not inhale.”
Hand sanitizers like Germ-X are wonderful inventions. We can have clean hands and not dry them out with cheap soap. However, there is a developing issue surrounding this little marvel; kids are beginning to use it for a high. If you take a quick sniff, it has a very pleasant aroma. However, it is 62% ethyl alcohol. The warnings on the back, among other things, actually read, “Do not inhale.”
Sniffing it once to check it out is not harmful, just like getting a quick whiff of gas won’t knock you down. However, if a person were to draw it in with a long, deep breath, then there may be a problem. I don’t know what effect this particular product can have on the brain because no information has been generated by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. However, on a message board I visited while researching this, one person said he started on hand sanitizer but then moved to huffing straight isopropyl alcohol and became addicted. So, the hand sanitizer can be a gateway to other things.
Huffing is a very real problem, and it’s so dangerous because teens are doing it with legal things they find in their homes. So, please discuss this issue with your children. Here are some facts to get you started. I pulled this off http://www.abovetheinfluence.com/.
Inhalants are volatile substances or fumes from products such as glue or paint thinner that are sniffed or "huffed" to cause a high. Inhalants affect the brain with great speed and force and keep oxygen from reaching the lungs. Animal and human research shows that most inhalants are extremely toxic. Perhaps the most significant toxic effect of chronic exposure to inhalants is widespread and long-lasting damage to the brain and other parts of the nervous system. The intoxication produced by inhalants usually lasts just a few minutes; therefore, users often try to extend the "high" by continuing to inhale repeatedly over several hours, which increases the risk.
In addition to these physical and mental health problems, recent research shows that inhalant use is associated with symptoms of depression. Between 2004 and 2006, an estimated 218,000 youths aged 12-17 used inhalants and also experienced depression in the past year. The same research showed that depressed teens were more than three times as likely to start using inhalants than teens with no symptoms of depression. The reverse is also true, showing that teens often started using inhalants before depression began.
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