So the news media is afire with reports of kids—yes, ordinary, good stay-at-home kids like yours… especially like yours—drinking hand sanitizer to get drunk! And many are ending up in a hospital! And here is a video we pulled off YouTube to prove it!

The Czar knows BS when he sees it, and this, folks, is it.

Here is the more probable trajectory (or what Doc would call the etiology) of this story:

Some kids come up with a nutty idea for a joke video. They thoroughly wash out an empty bottle of hand sanitizer and fill it with a harmless substance, and video themselves drinking it and reacting as if it tastes really bad, and then they upload that to the Web.

They make ridiculous claims at school which no one believes, and then reveal there is video of them doing it…here, here’s the URL. Check it out, dude.

This gets forwarded around outside the immediate circle, and eventually skyrockets up in popularity at YouTube, where most local news teams get about half their stories (the other half is from Facebook). And the story goes viral. ZOMG! The kids these days! Out of control! Some of them as young as eleventy!

A few kids see or hear about the original video, and then try it—after all, the kids in video seem all right. And naturally they get sick, thereby fulfilling the news-media-generated fantasy that kids are doing this by the millions and gettng sick.

In two weeks, you will never see or hear about this story again except in a lame late night television opening monologue bit, and only then as a passing reference to explain Joe Biden. For this is because the story shall have run its course, and the news media will quietly realize they were originally duped and possibly led to the actual problem of kids getting sick by promoting it in the first place.

Some pointers: obviously, the alcohol in hand sanitizer is fast-evaporating isopropyl-based, which you not only cannot drink, but would taste horrific. Even a slight amount would do it; however, Purell-brand sanitizer, however, contains a dose of ethyl alcohol, and in one documented case, an eight-year-old kid ingested enough to raise her blood alcohol level to intoxicated levels. With Purell being 126 proof ethyl alcohol, it didn’t take much.

When did this happen? Back in 2007. Since then, cases have been desultory at best, and you know why? (a) Hand sanitizer tastes incredibly bad, (b) it makes you sick in seconds, and (c) there are incredibly easier ways to obtain alcohol. Any one of the three of those is enough to quash this story beyond a few extreme idiots. And hand sanitizer has all three.

Chalk this up to a media-fueled hysteria with little basis in reality.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.