The New Kick

Each year thousands of misguided teenagers explore the fuzzy-edged world of the cheap kick. Over the years, they have tried the hopped-up delights of aspirin-and-Coke, cough syrup, Benzedrine inhalers and lighter-fluid fumes.

The newest kick is glue sniffing. A 14-year-old sniffer explains: "You take a tube of plastic glue, the kind squares use to make model airplanes, and you squeeze it all out in a handkerchief, see. Then you roll up the handkerchief into a sort of tube, put the end in your mouth and breathe through it. It's simple and it's cheap. It's quick, too. Man!"

And it is dangerous. In Salt Lake City, where there had been an alarming rise in arrests of "nice boys" as well as chronic juvenile offenders on drunk charges, police found that the youngsters were indeed horrendously drunk, but without a trace of alcohol in their systems. Glue-sniffing parties have resulted in vicious beatings. One boy was attacked by his best friend, who came at him with a broken bottle; another challenged a quartet of marines to a fight. Dr. Alan K. Done, director of the Poison Center at Salt Lake County General Hospital, sees a further--and more serious--danger in glue inhalation. Says Dr. Done: "I have found definite evidence of effects on the kidneys from glue sniffing. It is too soon to know whether this effect is temporary or permanent damage."

To the sniffer, glue has much the same effect as alcohol. Regular users develop a tolerance for the stuff, need more sniffs for a kick as time goes by. Glue sniffing is definitely habit-forming. Says a Salt Lake City teenager: "I don't like it ... but I go back to it. If I could get liquor. I would. But it's too expensive and we can't get it anyway."

It is not the glue itself but the volatile solvents (acetone, butyl acetate, toluene) used to make the glue dry faster that are poisonous as well as intoxicating. Glue manufacturers are trying to find a remedy for the situation. Says Charles D. Miller, president of Tester Corp., Rockford, Ill., makers of model-airplane cement: "We are going to change the formula by reducing the amount of acetone so that the narcotic effect will be slowed down, but I am afraid the kids will just switch to another product."

The next cheap kick is already on the scene. Some fast-drying marking pencils contain a solvent like those in the plastic glues, are more inconspicuous for sniffing. A Washington, D.C., public school music teacher told recently of a boy in her class who ordinarily never sang a note. One day she noticed him sniffing a marking pencil behind his songbook: "Then he got up and sang like a bird."

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