Adolescents have died huffing from cans of Dust-Off brand compressed air.
While many of the Internet-circulated tales of tragedy prove either to be baseless scaremongering or vastly overblown accounts that contain only a small shred of truth, this one,unfortunately, checks out in every respect. On 2 March 2005, 14-year-old Kyle Williams was found dead in his bedroom at his family's Cleveland-area home. At 5:45 that morning, his mother, Kathy Williams (a nurse by profession), had attempted to wake him before she left for work. She initially thought Kyle was joking when he failed to get up, but she then pulled back the covers and found her son lying motionless, a can of Dust-Off, a common computer cleaner, next to his face. She immediately called the Lake County Sheriff's Office.The boy's father and the author of the e-mail, Jeff Williams, is an East Cleveland police officer. He was on duty when his son's body was discovered and arrived home to find Lake County Sheriff's Office personnel already on the scene. According to the coroner, the boy died sometime between midnight and 1 a.m. His mother had kissed him goodnight at a quarter tomidnight.Jeff Williams does indeed have a German Shepherd named Thor who had been a police dog with the East Cleveland Police Department until he was shot in the line of duty in March 2001. Thor's injuries necessitated his retirement from the force, so he became the Williams' family pet.Mr. Williams' letter began as a post to an online message board he visited for support in the wake of his son's death. It prompted a teacher who found it there to ask if she could read it to her class, which in turn prompted him to write for her a more detailed version that gave a better sense of who his son had been. He also posted this expanded account to a couple of message boards where he was discussing his grief. It is this version that now circulates.This sad e-mail about a teen's demise reached us in the first week of April 2005. By mid-May 2005, versions in circulation had picked up the following attribution, causing many to conclude the death had taken place in Calgary, Alberta, rather than in Cleveland, Ohio:Tracey Lowey, B.A., M.S. Crime Analyst Targeted Enforcement Unit #583 Calgary Police Service Office: 206-8360Dust-Off, the product that proved to be Kyle Williams' undoing, has been implicated in a number of deaths:The September 2001 death of 19-year-old Austin Purser in Valdez, Alaska, was attributed to Dust-Off. According to the young man's roommates, the decedent had come home about 4 a.m. and had huffed from an aerosol can of Dust-Off. In January 2004 in Brooklyn, New York, 18-year-old Kristian Roggio was killed when her vehicle was struck by one driven by Vincent Litto, 20, who had been huffing from a can of Dust-Off when his car went over the double yellow lines and crashed head-on into hers. The coroner's report on one of the fatalities in an August 2004 single-vehicle automobile accident in Sacramento, California, revealed the presence of difluoroethane (the propellant in Dust-Off) in the blood of a passenger in a Jeep which was estimated to have been traveling at 90 mph when it jumped a curb, hit a telephone pole, then crashed into a concrete wall. A can of Dust-Off was found in the wrecked vehicle. Of the three teens who died as a result of that crash (Matthew Walas, 15; Jeremiah Cremins, 16; Nicholas Goudberg, 17), only Walas' blood was tested, leaving open the question of whether the driver, Goudberg, was also under the influence. (Walas was killed instantly, whereas Goudberg lived on for a further eight days, and Cremins lasted three weeks past the accident. The coroner's office did not order toxicology tests on the blood of the two youths who lingered because these would have proved useless as the young men had received transfusions, plus they both lived long enough for any chemicals to have dissipated from their bloodstreams.)Falcon, the maker of Dust-Off, is aware its product is abused in this fashion. It has posted information about inhalant abuse on its web site, and cans of Dust Off bear a label cautioning users against misuse of the product and carry this warning in large red block letters: 'Inhalant abuse is illegal and can cause permanent injury or be fatal. Please use our product responsibly.'Yet while it might be tempting to regard this threat as one limited to Dust-Off (and therefore as a danger that can be averted by banning a specific product from the home), the truth is a great number of teens and pre-teens routinely attempt to get high by abusing inhalants and solvents found in common household products. Dust-Off is just one of a thousand or more products that can abruptly end the life of someone foolishly looking for an inhalant high. The list of items that can be turned to this purpose is almost endless and includes such innocuous-looking goods as hair spray and aerosol whipped cream. Depending on how the intoxicant is taken in, the process is referred to as 'bagging' or 'huffing' - bagging requires the substance be contained in a plastic or paper bag which the thrill-seeker then breathes from, while huffing involves either breathing directly from an aerosol or through a cloth soaked in solvent.Both bagging and huffing can, and have, proved fatal. Sudden death can result on the first try, making one's first time seeking this particular kick also one's last. That first time's being a killer isn't an exaggeration, either: 22% of all inhalant-abuse deaths occur among users who had not previously bagged or huffed. Suffocation, dangerous behavior, and aspiration account for 45% of inhalant abuse fatalities, with 'sudden sniffing death' (fatal cardiac arrhythmia) causing the remaining 55%. Suffocation usually takes its toll through the victim's slipping into unconsciousness then dying of a lack of oxygen, but it can also happen through airway obstruction brought about through swelling caused by spraying certain agents into the mouth. Dangerous behavior-related deaths are those in which inhalant abuse cause the deceased to engage in risk-laden activities that bring about his demise: he drowns, jumps or falls from a high place, dies of exposure or hypothermia, is in (or on) a vehicle that he loses control of at high speed, or accidentally sets himself on fire (most inhalants are flammable). Death through aspiration of vomited materials comes about through an unconscious victim's protective airway reflexes being depressed by the chemicals involved. 'Sudden sniffing death' is a simple way of saying the hydrocarbons being inhaled provoke irregular heart rhythms in the victim, leading to sudden fatal cardiac arrest. Even young and very healthy hearts fail this way.According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the peak age of inhalant abusers is 14 to 15 years, with onset occurring in those as young as 6 to 8 years. Use declines typically by 17 to 19 years of age.Inhalant abuse is rife among children and teens for a number of reasons beyond the usual factors that inspire young people to experiment with drugs, such as curiosity, thrill seeking, escapism, defiance, and peer pressure. First, the products required to produce inhalant highs are readily available in every home. Even when users have to resort to buying their own, the goods cost little and are easy to purchase, both in terms of availability (almost every store sells at least a few items that can be huffed) and lack of challenge by sales clerks (kids generally need not fear provoking adult disapproval or undue questioning through the act of buying cans of whipped cream). No drug dealers need be sought out, no furtive connections with the underworld made; purchases are easily effected at the corner store, even by the most unsavvy and knock-kneed with terror at the thought of being caught.Second, because these products are an ordinary part of the household landscape, they take on for many a presumption of safety. Few adults are accustomed to thinking of air freshener as something that can kill, or of Magic Markers as items that can end lives; these are instead viewed as non-dangerous goods, the sort of ordinary household necessities one doesn't so much as look at twice let alone regard with mistrust. Kids can easily take that bland acceptance a step further, adding a presumption of harmlessness to that which is routinely left about for anyone to use.Third, little other than the act of bagging or huffing itself needs to be concealed from parental eyes. Very few moms and dads will stop to question why their kid has taken to keeping spray deodorant in his backpack or wonder why the family's can of furniture polish keeps turning up in their boy's bedroom, even if these same parents were the sort to be thrown into a panic by the merest glimpse of something that might be a baggie containing dried, crushed plant material. Whereas other intoxicants can't be explained away when found by dear old Dad (a bottle of hooch won't pass for shampoo, nor a bag of pills for candy), inhalants continue to look like what they primarily are: typical household products. Other possible tip-offs to what the sensation seeker has been up to will be dismissed almost as soon as they're noted - strange chemical odors wafting about the child will be brushed off by even the most drug-alert parents as 'Somebody must have Scotchguarded something around here' or 'That boy has been playing in somebody's garage.' Small sores and marks around the youngster's mouth and nose will be attributed to everything under the sun except inhalant abuse (e.g., allergies, colds, scratching, the family dog, or even 'Clumsy must have tripped over his big feet again').It's this triple whammy of factors (readily-obtainable inexpensive high-producing chemicals, intoxicants and tip-offs that are easily concealed from parents, and utter failure on the part of users to appreciate the very real dangers inherent to the practice) that makes inhalant abuse prevalent among drug-curious pre-teens and teens. On their side of the equation, adults rarely pick up on the abuse or its signs unless they actually catch someone red-handed, nor do they grasp how lethal this form of drug use is, concentrating instead on the threat posed by the illegal substances proffered by drug dealers.Barbara 'greater danger lurks in the home than on the playground' MikkelsonAdditional information: Inhalants and Solvent Abuse (Martin J. Smilkstein, M.D.) Inhalants, Bagging, Huffing and Youth (Mid-Columbia Center for Living) National Inhalant Prevention Coalition
nan