School Supplies.....Or Gateway Drugs?

Stay Informed.

As fall approaches and parents go back-to-school shopping for their children, one topic that is not getting enough media coverage. Lost in the shuffle of book bags, pencils, and three ring binders, is the very serious topic of gateway supplies and what they can lead to.

It starts out innocently enough, with little Johnny accidently sniffing a marks a lot. Fast forward twenty years later and there he is, behind the same school, scrounging in the dumpsters while trying to get just one more fix. How does it get to this you ask? How did your little snowflake become a gas huffing lunatic with hallucinations of little green men that have come to take him away?

Take a short trip with me through the gateway and into the mind of a former glue eating marker sniffer. Be proactive; take charge of those school supplies now. Don’t let that crayon eating graduate to something far more sinister.

According to this made up statistic, children who eat glue are far more likely to:

• Wet the bed
• Contract Cooties
• Make up words
• Watch the same movie more than once
• Refuse to eat vegetables
• Pick up the cat by the tail
• Jump on the couch
• Pick their nose

Johnny goes off to school wide eyed and eager to learn wearing his new sneakers and matching Spider man backpack. He has everything that was on the supplies list as you kiss him good-bye and whisk him off to the safe confines of our fine public school system. Little did you know that he has been armed with a deadly toxin in the form of Elmer’s glue, you might as well given him a few hits of acid.

In the classroom, as he accidently takes his first hit, entering a euphoric state as the macaroni comes to life, dancing on the construction paper that is now floating. He may begin to drool as he loses focus. He's unable to stay on task as his motor functions are affected by the poison you have unknowingly administered. He glides through the day higher than the kites on the playground, on his way to becoming a glue sniffing menace to anyone in his path.

Signs: Terrible drawings, coloring outside the lines, a lack of attention span, an appetite for candy.

Without immediate intervention Johnny will move on to stage two. The gate is open and he’s walking right into the haze of no return.

With a tolerance for glue, you're little stoner has moved on to his new drug of choice. We’re talking about n-propanol, n-butanol, and diacetone alcohol, known on the streets as a Sharpie marker.

Before you gasp in disbelief know this, 88% of classrooms contain these highly potent, dangerous chemical weapons of toxic madness. (statistic pulled from thin air).With brightly colored caps and colors, along with innocuous names such as cranberry and aqua, the markers are ideal for luring the little minds they stand to ravage. Once the harmful toxins find their way to the brain, the damage is irreversible.

Signs: Mood swings, temper tantrums, imaginary friends, talking gibberish

If your little one displays any of these signs it may be too late. Sometimes the signs go unnoticed until Johnny is caught rummaging through the drawers looking for the rubber cement. Often many parents look back and see the signs in hindsight, the cartoons, the candy, and the highly obnoxious singing and yelling. No normal child does that.

Once again, if this goes undiagnosed, the sniffing and huffing will continue through grade school and into the teenage years. By now Johnny has graduated to whippets, huffing spray paint, gasoline, until finally he is introduced to bath salts, and we all know how that ends.

Knowing the signs is paramount to keeping your child clean. This will give you a chance at keeping little Johnny’s mind clean and unharmed from the many dangerous gateway drugs out there.