Inspire 21

Dusting – Latest Drug in Schools

Latest Drug in Middle School –  ‘Dusting’

First, I’m going to tell you a little about me and my family. My name is Jeff. I am a Police Officer  for a city which is known nationwide for it’s  crime rate. We have a lot of gangs and drugs. At  one point we were # 2 in the nation in homicides  per capita. I also have a police K-9 named Thor.  He was certified in drugs and general duty.. He  retired at 3 years old because he was shot in  the line of duty. He lives with us now and I  still train with him because he likes it. I  always liked the fact that there was no way to  bring drugs into my house. Thor wouldn’t allow  it. He would tell on you. The reason I say this  is so you understand that I know about  drugs.

I have taught in schools about  drugs. My wife asks all our kids at least once a  week if they used any drugs.

I  like building computers occasionally and started  building a new one in February 2005. I also was  working on some of my older computers. They were  full of dust so on one of my trips to the  computer store I bought a 3 pack  of DUST  OFF. Dust  Off is a can of compressed air to blow dust off  a computer. A  few weeks later when I went to use one of them  they were all used. I talked to my kids and my  two sons both said they had used them on their  computer and messing around with them. I yelled  at them for wasting the 10 dollars I paid for  them.

On February 28 I went back to the  computer store. They didn’t have the 3 pack  which I had bought on sale so I bought a single  jumbo can of Dust Off. I went home and set it  down beside my computer.

On March 1st, I  left for work at 10 PM. Just before midnight my  wife went down and kissed Kyle good-night. At  5:30 am the next morning Kathy went downstairs  to wake Kyle up for school, before she left for  work. He was propped up in bed with his legs  crossed and his head leaning over. She called to  him a few times to get up. He didn’t move. He  would sometimes tease her like this and pretend  he fell back asleep. He was never easy to get  up. She went in and shook his arm. He fell over.  He was pale white and had the straw from the  Dust Off can coming out of his mouth.. He had  the new can of Dust Off in his hands. Kyle was  dead.

I am a police officer and I had  never heard of this. My wife is a nurse and she  had never heard of this. We later found out from  the coroner, after the autopsy, that only the  propellant from the can of Dust off was in his  system. No other drugs.. Kyle had died between  midnight and 1 AM.

I found out that using  Dust Off is being done mostly by kids ages 9  through 15. They even have a name for it. It’s  called dusting. A take off from the Dust Off  name. It gives them a slight high for about 10  seconds. It makes them dizzy. A boy who lives  down the street from us showed Kyle how to do  this about a month before. Kyle showed his best  friend… Told him it was cool and it couldn’t  hurt you. It’s just compressed air. It can’t  hurt you. His best friend said so.

Kyle  was wrong. It’s not just compressed air . It  also contains a propellant called R2. It’s a  refrigerant like what is used in your  refrigerator. It is a heavy gas.. Heavier than  air. When you inhale it, it fills your lungs and  keeps the good air, with oxygen, out. That’s why  you feel dizzy, buzzed. It decreases the oxygen  to your brain, to your heart. IT KILLS  YOU.

The horrible part about this is  there is no warning. There is no level that  kills you. It’s not cumulative or an overdose;  it can just go randomly, terribly wrong. IT’S  NOT AN OVERDOSE . You don’t die later. Or not  feel good and say I’ve had too much…. You  usually die as you’re breathing it in. If not  you die within 2 seconds of finishing ‘the hit.’  That ‘s why the straw was still in Kyle’s mouth  when he died. Why his eyes were still open. The  experts want to call this huffing. The kids  don’t believe its huffing. And that’s why its  more accepted. There is no chemical reaction, no  strong odor.. It doesn’t follow the huffing  signals. Kyle complained a few days before he  died of his tongue hurting. It probably did. The  propellant causes frostbite. If I had only  known..

It’s easy to say hey, it’s my  life and I’ll do what I want .. But it isn’t…  Others are always affected. This has forever  changed our family’s life.. I have a hole in my  heart and soul that can never be fixed. The pain  is so immense I can’t describe it.. There’s  nowhere to run from it. I cry all the time and I  don’t ever cry. I do what I’m supposed to do but  I don’t really care. My kids are messed up. One  won’t talk about it. The other will only sleep  in our room at night. And my wife, I can’t even  describe how bad she is taking this. I thought  we were safe because of Thor. I thought we were  safe because we knew about t drugs and talked to  our kids about them.

After Kyle died  another story came out. A probation Officer went  to the school system next to ours to speak with  a student. While there he found a student using  Dust Off in the bathroom. This student told him  about another student who also had some in his  locker. This is a rather affluent school system.  They will tell you they don’t have a drug  problem there. They don’t even have a dare or  plus program there.. So rather than tell  everyone about this ‘new’ way of getting high  they found, they hid it. The probation officer  told the media after Kyle’s death and they, the  school, then admitted to it. I know that if they  would have told the media and I had heard, it  wouldn’t have been in my house.

We need  to get this out of our homes and school computer  labs.. Using Dust Off isn’t new and some  ‘professionals’ do know about. It just isn’t  talked about much, except by the kids.. They all  seem to know about it. April 2 nd was 1 month  since Kyle died.. April 5th would have been his  15th birthday. And every weekday I catch myself  sitting on the living room couch at 2:30 in the  afternoon and waiting to see him get off the  bus.

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VERIFIED AS TRUE! Learn more at Snopes.com

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 March 2, 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 (above), 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.

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