fracas

Into The Bleach

Last week’s Sunday Snopes feature dealt with a perception that a vandalized car was the result of a woman scorned… similar to the woman in Carrie Underwood’s new song Before He Cheats. That claim was partly true.

Anyone who uses email is bound to, at some point or another, receive an email containing a ‘warning’ about some terrible crime or event that they should beware of. These emails always tell the recipient to pass it along to everyone they know in order to warn others and ’save’ someone else from the same terrible fate. Most often, these emails contain some sort of claim relating the event or crime in the warning, to a specific location or police department in order to convince the recipient of its authenticity.

In mostly every case, these email warnings are hoaxes, nothing more than malicious chain letters that scare the uninformed into becoming pawns in the spamming of hundreds of thousands of people.

Snopes.com is a credible place to verify such stories you might receive. As a regular Sunday feature, fracas will highlight a different story each week to do our part in stopping or lessening the impact of the distribution of such stories.

Sunday Snopes Snippets

Sunday, May 27, 2007:

Claim: Drinking bleach can help a drug user beat drug testing.

Status: False!

This one isn’t an email warning (to my knowledge) but serves as information that should be distributed for the sake of every uninformed and desperate drug user who might be willing to give it a try.

[Quote Snopes] “Recently, a juvenile defendant in Baldwin County, Alabama, passed out after a court hearing, and he told the paramedics who treated him that he had drunk bleach earlier in the week in the belief that it would help him beat an upcoming drug test.  Whether or not the youthful offender was being truthful about having resorted to such an extreme measure, the rumor that drinking bleach can defeat drug testing is now out there, apparently having sprung from a mistaken assumption that ingesting bleach will “cleanse” one’s urine just as effectively as putting bleach into a washing machine will clean one’s clothes.

Not only is this scheme ineffective, but it’s also potentially quite harmful, as drinking bleach can wreak serious damage on the human throat, stomach, and digestive tract:

Doctors say drinking “pure” household bleach can [burn] your esophagus and stomach. “It can cause chemical burns. In addition to that, it can cause nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain,” said Mobile County Health Department Dr. Kamran Afzal.”

[End Quote Snopes]

Fracas would like to make a plea to anyone out there who might come across this page while searching for information about drinking bleach to beat a drug test.

Please DON’T do it. If you’re scared you may get in trouble at work, lose your job, etc. PLEASE realize that there is no job that is worth losing your life or destroying your esophagus and stomach. If you are ready for help with a drug abuse problem, please click one of the following links to resources:

The National Alcohol and Substance Abuse Information Center (USA)
Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse
Australian Drug Information Network
Try find your location at Google’s results listing for the search term “drug abuse hotlines“.
Other International Hotlines

For other details regarding this story please click here to read the full snopes.com write-up.

Please bookmark fracas. Your next Sunday Snopes feature will be posted on Sunday, June 3, 2007!