As usual for the type of screeching and breathless hit piece that these types of things inevitably become, it seems that two very distinct things are being conflated here in a probably deliberate attempt to make them appear equivalent.
The headline image shows a bunch of nitrous oxide cartridges or "whippets" discarded on the ground, and there is one lonely mention of nitrous down at the very bottom of the article. The article puts a lot of scary words around "inhalants" but stops short of defining which ones they're actually talking about, and I'm guessing (having not watched any of the TikTok videos nor do I intend to) that nitrous is not the actual, or at least only, concern here. Either that or they're trying hard to imply that nitrous fries your brain as much as huffing, say, tetrafluoroethane.
Doing nitrous (or whippets, or hippie crack, or laughing gas, or whatever you want to call it this decade) is neither new, nor is it particularly harmful provided you can manage not to do it in such a moronic way that you asphyxiate yourself or pathologically huff the stuff at the edge of high precipices or while driving or something.
Inhaling propellant gasses from aerosol cans, meanwhile, i.e. the usual sort of "huffing," is monumentally stupid and also a fast track to permanent brain damage.
Just make sure you're packin' the right kind of chrome, choom.
I remember huffing gasoline, butane, Freon, and super glue back in the 90s. It’s a wonder I can breathe at all these days, as well as coherently string more than two words together.
I don't understand tiktok. Last trend i heard about was people cheating banks to get free money (aka fraud) and now they're doing inhalants as a trend? How many brain cells does the average tik toker have?
I think the running conspiracy is that the platform is a psyop to get idiots to try doing idiotic things they wouldn't otherwise get exposed to.
From what I've heard, the Chinese version of the app's recommendations algorithm leans towards educational content instead of topics literally trying to tear at the seams of modern society.
TikTok is an app that's not completely controlled by YTs. So we should expect to see a bunch of sensational headlines demonizing the company until it gets banned.
I would never want to be a teenager now. Like having casual sex can give lifelong diseases, the right wing bearing down on everyone's freedoms (except theirs ofc), hitchhiking is a death trap, etc etc.
If I was growing up now I probably wouldn't make it to 20.
For most of us, huffing always seemed like a pretty stupid thing to do. You’d have to be brain damaged to want to. Calling it “chroming” doesn’t change that
Yeah I remember it felt like fun, until I found out it was bad for you. That along with any kind of asphyxiation - who knew! You'd think just being able to look up "is huffing chrome bad for you" on the internet would inoculate kids against this kind of stupidity.
By way of explanation, we were all quite poor and ignorant where I grew up.
I remember when I realized how dangerous it was when a girl died ... essentially drowning in the condensed gas fumes in her lungs. That woke us up quick.
How about don't let your kids on a shitty social media platform to begin with. Besides it being a farm for data for the Chinese, it's been shown via various studies the platform is like crack for your dopamine system.