Smoking Smarties

By Tim Damos/News Republic

Youngsters eager to mimic the bad habits of adults have found a new method. It's called "smoking Smarties," and it's all over the Internet.

Kids posting videos on sites such as YouTube show viewers how to crush up the hard, chalky candy, suck the dust through the cellophane wrapper and blow it out as if it were cigarette smoke.

Some say the mock-smokers are more properly described as Airheads than Smarties. And health concerns led one local shop to pull the product from its shelves.

Ralph Pierce sold Smarties for seven years at Gem City Candy in downtown Baraboo before learning about the "smoking Smarties" craze on a television talk show Monday morning. He quit selling the product a few hours later.

"If they're not wise enough they could inhale

it into their lungs and it could get in there cause difficulties," Pierce said. "You don't want them to play around with something like that."

But he said Smarties are only the most recent addition to a long list of products that people have found unintended uses for — like glue and helium balloons — and he doesn't blame the manufacturer.

A few years ago, people learned how to make a powerful eruption of cola by dropping a Mentos mint candy into a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. The Internet has no shortage of similar videotaped experiments.

"It doesn't kill you. It doesn't hurt at all," said YouTube user ballerboy4life, who posted a video tutorial on how to smoke Smarties more than a year ago. "It's just like candy when it's in your mouth. You've just got ashes from the candy."

The idea isn't too appealing to others.

"I would never do something like that," said 18-year-old Jesse Forston, a student at Baraboo High School.

While some districts around the country have had to take action against Smarties smokers, the trend doesn't seem to have caught on locally.

Jack Young Middle School Principal Ben Jones said he has seen students try to simulate drug use with hard candy at previous jobs, but never during his time in Baraboo.

"Most of the time what I've seen in former districts is they pretend to snort it or they actually snort it just to be funny," Jones said. "But I've never seen the smoke thing."

If Baraboo students aren't following the trend, that's a good thing, said Sauk County Public Health Director Cindy Bodendein. She said the new fad could be dangerous.

"I guess I would be concerned of what they're possibly pulling into their lungs," Bodendein said. "Even though it's ingredients that are all safe when ingested through your digestive system, it's probably not safe to be inhaling that. Usually if people ingest things into their lungs like that it can lead to pneumonia."

Makers of Smarties aren't thrilled about the way their product is being used.

"It's just dumb," Ce De Candy Inc.'s Vice President of Sales and Marketing Eric Ostrow told the Wall Street Journal.