Dust Off- NOT A HOAX
Moms View Message Board: Parenting Discussion: Archive July-December 2005:
Dust Off- NOT A HOAX
My mom sent me this and I looked it up on www.snopes.com. It is real please read. I bet some of you in your house have this.
First I'm going to tell you a little about me and my family. My name is Jeff.
I am a Police Officer for a city which is known nationwide for its crime rate.
We have a lot of gangs and drugs. At one point we were #2 in the nation in homicides per capita. I also have a police K-9 named Thor. He was certified in drugs and
general duty. He retired at 3 years old because he was shot in the line of duty.
He lives with us now and I still train with him because he likes it. I always liked the fact that there was no way to bring drugs into my house. Thor wouldn't allow it.
He would tell on you. The reason I say this is so you understand that I know about drugs. I have taught in schools bout drugs. My wife asks all our kids at least once a week if they used any drugs. Makes them promise they wont. I like building computers occasionally and started building a new one in February 2005.
I also was working on some of my older computers. They were full of dust so on one of my trips to the computer store I bought a 3 pack of DUST OFF.
Dust Off is a can of compressed air to blow dust off a computer. A few weeks later when I went to use them they were all used. I talked to my kids and my 2 sons both said they had used them on their computer and messing around with them. I yelled at them for wasting the 10 dollars I paid for them. On February 28 I went back to the computer store. They didn't have the 3 pack which I had bought on sale so I bought a
single jumbo can of Dust Off. I went home and set it down beside my computer. On March 1st I left for work at 10 PM. At 11 PM my wife went down and kissed Kyle goodnight. At 5:30 am the next morning Kathy went downstairs to wake Kyle up for
school, before she left for work. He was sitting up in bed with his legs crossed and his head leaning over. She called to him a few times to get up. He didn't move.
He would sometimes tease her like this and pretend he fell back asleep. He was never easy to get up. She went in and shook his arm. He fell over. He was pale white and had the straw from the Dust Off can coming out of his mouth.
He had the new can of Dust Off in his hands. Kyle was dead. I am a police officer and I had never heard of this. My wife is a nurse and she had never heard of this.
We later found out from the coroner, after the autopsy, that only the propellant from the can of Dust off was in his system. No other drugs. Kyle had died between midnight and 1 am. I found out that using Dust Off is being done mostly by kids ages 9 through 15. They even have a name for it. It's called dusting. A take off from the Dust Off name. It gives them a slight high for about 10 seconds. It makes them dizzy. A boy who lives down the street from us showed Kyle how to do this about a month before. Kyle showed his best friend. Told him it was cool and it couldn't hurt you. It's just compressed air. It can't hurt you. His best friend said no. Kyle's death Kyle was wrong. It's not just compressed air. It also contains a propellant. I think its R2.
Its a refrigerant like what is used in your refrigerator. It is a heavy gas. Heavier than air. When you inhale it fills your lungs and keeps the good air, with oxygen,
out. That's why you feel dizzy, buzzed. It decreases the oxygen to your
brain and to your heart. Kyle was right. It can't hurt you.
IT KILLS YOU.
The horrible part about this is there is no warning. There is no level that kills you.
It's not cumulative or an overdose; it can just go randomly, terribly wrong. Roll the dice and if your number comes up you die. ITS NOT AN OVERDOSE.
It's Russian roulette. You don't die later.
Or not feel good and say I've had too much. You usually die as your breathing it in.
If not you die within 2 seconds of finishing "the hit." That's why the straw was still in Kyle's mouth when he died. Why his eye's were still open. The experts want to call this huffing. The kids don't believe its huffing. As adults we tend to lump many things together. But it doesn't fit here. And that's why its more accepted. There is no chemical reaction. It does not have a strong odor. It doesn't follow the huffing signals.
Kyle complained a few days before he died of his tongue hurting. It probably did.
The propellant causes frostbite.
If I had only known. Its easy to say hay, it's my life and I'll do what I want. But it isn't.
Others are always affected. 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 can't 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 won't talk about it. The other will only sleep in our room at night. And my wife, I can't even describe how bad she is taking this. I thought we were safe because of Thor. I thought we were safe because we knew about drugs and talked to our kids about them. After Kyle died another story came out. A Probation Officer went to the school system next to ours to speak with a student. While there he found a student using Dust Off in the bathroom. This student told him about another student who also had some in his locker. This is a rather affluent school system. They will tell you they don't have a drug problem there. They don't even have a dare or plus bsp; program there. So rather than tell everyone about this "new" way of getting high they found, they hid it. The probation officer told the media after Kyle's death and they, the school, then admitted to it. I know that if they would have told the media and I had heard, it wouldn't have been in my house. We need to get this out of our homes and school computer labs.
Using Dust Off isn't new and some "professionals" do know about it. It just isn't talked about much, except by the kids. They know about it. April 2nd was 1 month since Kyle died. April 5th would have been his15th birthday, and every weekday I catch
myself sitting on the living room couch at 2:30 in the afternoon and waiting to see him get off the bus. I know Kyle is in heaven but I can't help but wonder if I died and went to Hell. This is a true story, check it out at this link: http://www.snopes.com/toxins/dustoff.asp Please read and talk to your children about inhalant abuse. If you don't have children, forward this to those who do.
Forward it to everyone you know. Eventually it might save some child's life.
Jeff
Is that a huffing thing the kids use?
That is awful. The thing about this is that your kids don't really have to have a drug problem, if one of their friends shows them how to do it and then your child might try it for the very first time and die from it. I certainly won't buy any of it and I will be telling my girls how dangerous it really is.
Huffing was with aeresol paints, Feona.
How scary!!!
Here's the link to the Snopes/Urban Legends site about this particular email and similar tragic cases. I strongly urge every parent to read it.
http://www.snopes.com/toxins/dustoff.asp
I have read about Dust Off and other compressed air. Anything aeresol can be used to huff, so should be treated accordingly.
I never understood the need to get high & I hope my children feel the smae way.
Parents should also be careful with whipped cream. You know, the kind you spray on your icecream. One of my friends taught me that if you left the whipped cream sitting and didn't shake it up before you sprayed it, the gasses would be at the top. If you inhaled this, you would get a quick buzz that just lasted a few seconds I guess.
I did this once when I was about 13 I guess because I didn't think there was anything wrong with it. It was just whipped cream. I didn't like the feeling it gave me. It scared me and I never did it again.
I don't know if this can be as dangerous, but I'm sure it can be a stepping stone to other things that last longer.
I have only seen my kids put whipped cream on their desserts and the accelerant doesn't seem to be disappearing, so I don't think my kids are doing funny stuff with it!
Dustoff Story
Actually, it's not just Dust-Off or whipped cream that can be huffed. Further down in the article, there is this paragraph:
Yet 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.
Inhalants are one of those "drugs" that can kill the first time, there really isn't an overdose, it just always doesn't go down the right way. Kids can huff anything that has a propellent, so the can may say whipped cream, or air, but what makes it squirt out is a drug. Kids don't get that, as adults we probably don't think of it. But we need to take notice and be aware, don't keep things like that in the house if there is an alternative. I use dust off on my computer at times. I buy a can and use it, I don't keep extras laying around, etc.
When I buy my dust off at walmart the register makes a noise just like it does for medicines and other things that require a certain age.
I wondered why it did that the first time and then it dawned on me that is why.
oh wow, I had no idea  I guess I should talk to my 7 year old before he goes and gets any ideas.
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