When looking at today’s youth you see new trends, and not the wisest of trends to be picking up. A few of today’s newest and oddest college trends seem to be more vile and painful rather than funny and exciting. Bath salt and butt chugging and drinking hand sanitizer have taken a toll on many universities and colleges nationwide and the law has been getting more involved with these rising issues hitting our youth today.
Bath salts started becoming an issue in the south where it was mainly distributed in college-related areas. They can be found at local dive bars or smoke shops. They are distributed in concealed little bags, as if buying a bag of M&M’s. This new trend that has picked up rapidly in the United States since 2010 has taken a toll on many college students and civilians around the country today. Bath salts is a lab-made drug that mimics a mix of ecstasy, cocaine and meth. It’s a powerful substance that no human being should ever consume. After many lab reports and police reports, the law has been buckling down. The after effect of bath salt makes one feel paranoid, violent and agitated, at times leading to hallucinations. There have been many victims to bath salt already. Bath salt can cause a rare flesh-eating bacterial disease. Neurologically this synthetic drug can harm someone. Reports studied have shown that bath salt can make you lose control and make the consumer become something they have never dreamed of. Reports of humans trying to attack and eat other living beings while alive have been traced back to consumption of bath salt.
Brad Angelo, a communications major at Chaminade, believes that bath salts is stupid. “If you’re willing to waste your life with synthetic drugs that make you eat people, you should get some serious attention and help,” Angelo said.
Butt chugging, a new way of getting drunk, has also hit the fraternity streets at colleges around the country. Fraternities are known to initiate freshmen into their club and organization. However, initiation isn’t always the easiest of tasks. With butt chugging becoming popular among fraternities, police reports have been filed from the University of Tennessee where students have been hit with alcohol poisoning. It is known as an alcohol enema, your essentially chugging alcohol with a tube or hose into the butt. Alcohol is poured into the colon and bypasses the stomach, it is directly absorbed into the bloodstream and gets the consumer much drunker a lot faster than normal. With people not knowing of the aftermath, many consumers have fallen victim of butt chugging. It has been studied to give you massive rectum pain and painful discharge, and alcohol poisoning is a hazard as well due to the speed of which the blood alcohol level rises in the body.
Phi Kappa Alpha (pike) member Patrick Keane, a member of the pike fraternity organization, said “we’re a fraternity group, not a rectal disease. Pike has no interest with butt chugging.”
Washing your hands with hand sanitizer is enjoyable and clean; drinking it to get you wasted is a new trend among high schoolers. It’s open to teens on the streets as well as easy to buy in stores. It has been a growing trend because Liquid hand sanitizer is 62 percent to 65 percent ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, the main ingredient in beer, wine and spirits, making it 120-proof. A couple squirts from a hand sanitizer bottle in your mouth would be compared to drinking a couple shots of 151 rum, a potent type of rum that can intoxicate a person at a rapid pace. With underage alcohol consumers roaming around the country in academic institutions, how is the law going to prevent hand sanitizer from being sold to minors?
“I wish I would have known about this trend when I was younger,” said University of Hawaii graduate Opie Macieisky.” It would have saved me a lot of money.”
New trends will always come around year to year. It was just a few years ago when cough syrup was the new and crazy trend teens were raging about. Now we have bath salts, hand sanitizer and oddly enough butt chugging.