Check out the weekly article below by one of our ministry partners Donna McKinley, founder of McKinley Reports.
by Donna Funderburke McKinley
McKinley Reports has been warning parents and school officials for years about teens consuming hand sanitizer as a means to get intoxicated. Recently, the news decided to take notice after 16 California teenagers were treated in the past two months after ingesting hand sanitizer, six of them admitted to two San Fernando Valley emergency rooms. Proactive news is much healthier than reactive news.
According to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, the country’s 61 poison centers are getting more calls about it. Most hand sanitizers contain 62% ethyl alcohol, which means teens can make 120-proof from the sanitizer. They use salt to separate the alcohol from the gel mixture. They find the distillation instructions online.
It’s cheap and no one questions why they have it. Girls carry it in their purse and boys simply slip a bottle in the pocket of their jeans or simply buy the bottles that attach to a key chain. Booze of the go. Cyrus Rangan, the director of the toxicology bureau for the Los Angeles County public health department as well as a medical toxicology consultant for the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital is quoted saying, “It’s essentially a shot of hard liquor. All it takes is a few swallows and you have a drunk teenager.