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| Friday, November 10, 2006 |
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Dusting one's self 
| | This has forever changed our family's life. I have a hole in my heart and soul that can never be fixed. The pain is so immense I cant describe it. There's nowhere to run from it. I cry all the time and I don't ever cry. I do what I'm supposed to do but I don't really care. My kids are messed up. One wont talk about it. The other will only sleep in our room at night. And my wife, I cant even describe how bad she is taking this... I thought we were safe because we knew about drugs and talked to our kids about them. |
| | For me this recalls the death of Chris Baker, the nine-year-old son of friends back in North Carolina. His parents warned Chris about guns. But at a friend's house, Chris and the other boy found a revolver kept by the father for "protection". Nobody knows exactly what happened, except that the other boy pulled the trigger and Chris was killed by a bullet through the head. Chris was an only child and a terrific kid. In my mind I'll always see him with his baseball hat and glove, and a huge smile. He wore the same hat in his casket. I'll never forget that either. |
| | Chris was a smart kid too; but kids do stupid stuff with dangerous things. For too many of them, it's the last thing they do. |
| | While many of the Internet-circulated tales of tragedy prove either to be baseless scaremongering or vastly overblown accounts that contain only a small shred of truth, this one, Dust Off unfortunately, checks out in every respect. On 2 March 2005, 14-year-old Kyle Williams was found dead in his bedroom at his family's Cleveland-area home. At 5:45 that morning, his mother, Kathy Williams (a nurse by profession), had attempted to wake him before she left for work. She initially thought Kyle was joking when he failed to get up, but she then pulled back the covers and found her son lying motionless, a can of Dust-Off, a common computer cleaner, next to his face. |
| | ...while it might be tempting to regard this threat as one limited to Dust-Off (and therefore as a danger that can be averted by banning a specific product from the home), the truth is a great number of teens and pre-teens routinely attempt to get high by abusing inhalants and solvents found in common household products. Dust-Off is just one of a thousand or more products that can abruptly end the life of someone foolishly looking for an inhalant high. The list of items that can be turned to this purpose is almost endless and includes such innocuous-looking goods as hair spray and aerosol whipped cream. Depending on how the intoxicant is taken in, the process is referred to as 'bagging' or 'huffing' — bagging requires the substance be contained in a plastic or paper bag which the thrill-seeker then breathes from, while huffing involves either breathing directly from an aerosol or through a cloth soaked in solvent. |
| | Both bagging and huffing can, and have, proved fatal. Sudden death can result on the first try, making one's first time seeking this particular kick also one's last. That first time's being a killer isn't an exaggeration, either: 22% of all inhalant-abuse deaths occur among users who had not previously bagged or huffed. Suffocation, dangerous behavior, and aspiration account for 45% of inhalant abuse fatalities, with "sudden sniffing death" (fatal cardiac arrhythmia) causing the remaining 55%. Suffocation usually takes its toll through the victim's slipping into unconsciousness then dying of a lack of oxygen... |
| | We'll return to our more optimistic program shortly. |
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