this is uncanny

I'm walking down the aisle at the grocery store when lo and behold, I swear I run into the black dude from Friday. What are the chances of that! I'm not good with faces, so it's possible he just looked a lot like him, but he sure looked a lot like him.

Small world.

Have you seen the email going around about the police officer whose kid died from inhaling a can of pressurized gases? It sets it up by going into his experience with drugs and youth and then describes his shock that his kid got into a drug he didn't know about. You can read a version going around here. Somebody at my work forwarded it to all of us, and I found it pretty interesting.

I hadn't heard about Dust-Off in particular (a brand of pressurized gas used for things like blowing dust out of computer components), but the more general problem of inhalant abuse is very widespread, particularly among younger children. This is a good website for background info. In short, this is another way that our drug laws are ridiculously absurd and arbitrary. Some of the most dangerous chemicals produced in the world a 10 year old American kid can buy at the store. And since these are dual use (ie, they have legitimate nonrecreational purposes that are legal) most people don't think twice about having these chemicals in the home. That's why younger children go for them. There is no need to go to a drug dealer, and mommy and daddy aren't going to question very seriously why the kid has the product.

Let me say again, putting chemicals in your body that don't belong there is bad. But this is the kind of thing that shows you society can't simply legislate away drug problems. You have to teach responsibility (which is the responsibility of parents, not government) and treat medical conditions that arise. That requires good families (and churches and communities) and healthcare, not prisons and counterproductive government interference in the market. And of course, tragedy will still happen, but such is the nature of living. There's no need to compound the problem. Or to put it differently, the THC in marijuana is a lot safer than many of the other chemicals found in the home.