Just a little bit of Natural Selection

So in Britain, France, Canada, the US and here in good ol NZ, school kids are getting "high" from strangling themselves.

While it's hard to confirm the details, it appears that there have been three related fatalities of kids aged 11-13 - two of them last week.

Information on how to strangle oneself for fun is being passed around via txt and word of mouth. The coroner ruled in September that the benefits of warning parents of the phenomenon outweighed the danger of copycat behaviour and revealed the method of death of the (possible) first fatality.

I'm sorry, but how fucking dumb do you have to be to strangle yourself for kicks? Auto-erotic asphyxiation is one thing, but making yourself pass out by depriving the brain of oxygen on its own merits is just moronic.

My god, if kids want to get high that much maybe we should hand out ritalin or that fake weed stuff you can get at the dairy or something.

I think the main thing to remember here is that kids are really stupid and that they need to be talked to like adults about this sort of thing. No more of the hysterical lies about how one ecstasy pill will cause your insides to melt - it's time to start giving our kids the full information they need to make good decisions. Giving people with diminished decision-making capabilities (children and teenagers) incomplete or incorrect information is setting them up to fail.

The mother of the first fatality said their research had since revealed her son fitted the profile of someone at risk of playing the choking game - he was a high achiever, a homebody, played by the rules, did not engage in illegal activities such as underage drug and alcohol use and was in the vulnerable age group, the median age being 13 years. Sorry lady but I think if your son accidentally killed himself trying to get a buzz then I doubt he didn't drink or use any drugs - either that or you had scared him so badly with your misinformation about drugs and booze (though you could have easily believed the lies yourself) that he turned to something even more dangerous to fulfill that ubiquitous human desire - to get fucked up.