
“A middle school in Portsmouth, R.I. recently sent parents an alarming e-mail about kids who are ‘snorting’ or ‘smoking’ Smarties, a silly fad in which kids grind up the tart candy into a fine powder, then blow out the vapor as if they were smoking. (Full disclosure: I used to do something similar when my breath would freeze on frosty mornings.) Yet everyone is worried. Portsmouth School Committee Chair Dave Croston asserts that the fad ‘would not be normal behavior’ (God forbid!), and raises the ‘troubling issue of modeling.’ The Smarties story is just one of a series of mini-panics about kids and substance abuse that seem to get recycled every few years.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/01/20/everybody-panic/
Related posts:
Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders
Bitcoin needs to scale by a factor of 1000 to compete with Visa. Here’s how
YouTube Is Serving Covert Cryptocurrency Mining Ads
Swann home security camera sends video clips to random people
Bloggers expose lavish lifestyles of Putin loyalists
NSA mass collection of phone data is legal, federal judge rules
Obama administration asks Supreme Court to allow warrantless cellphone searches
Marines, sailors to 'invade' Jasper County for training mission
Okla. prison head gets new bullet-resistant SUV after botched execution
Enter the 'petro': Venezuela to launch oil-backed cryptocurrency
MI6 and CIA were told before invasion that Iraq had no active WMD, claims new documentary
Taxes: What Are Your Chances of Being Audited?
Google reveals top-secret plan to beam Internet to developing world from balloons at the edge of spa...
More modern monarchs choose not to rule until death
‘Technical glitch’ brings down Iranian censorship firewall temporarily