‘Let’s get drunk on hand sanitizer,’ say idiotic teenagers

You know, when we were teenagers, we had the motivation to get off our butts and find a way to buy alcohol underage. Nowadays, though, teens just don’t have the same gumption — they’ll just chug hand sanitizer because they’re too lazy to find the real thing.

In what doctors are calling a “dangerous new trend,” teenagers are drinking the gelatin substance to get drunk. At first, this story sounded so moronic that we were convinced it was a hoax (like when teenage girls were inserting tampons soaked in vodka), but six teenagers ended up in a Southern California ER with alcohol poisoning from the stuff — so we know at least six teens are stupid enough to do this, in California (big surprise). Not to mention, a quick YouTube search turned up a handful of videos showing kids egging each other on with bottles of hand sanitizer. What happened to keg stands and shot guns?

Hand sanitizer is 62 percent ethyl alcohol and makes a 120-proof liquid, as reported by KTLA. That’s comparable in proof (and taste, probably) to actual hard liquor.

“All it takes is just a few swallows and you have a drunk teenager,” said Cyrus Rangan, director of the toxicology bureau for the L.A. County Public Health Department.

“It is kind of scary that they go to that extent to get a shot of essentially hard liquor,” he added.

Other adjectives we’d use to describe this trend: baffling, preposterous, inconceivable. But alas, cough syrup, vanilla extract, and mouthwash are so passé. Kids these days, right? Always have to be the trend-setters….