Beware of Kids With Headphones

Dude. He is sooo high right now.

From the Dept. of Credulous Adults Will Freak Out Over Anything comes this ditty published on the web site for the Oklahoman: Kids are now downloading drugs. For reals.

Or maybe not. If you haven't heard, then sit back, because it will sound just as dumb as it is. So-called digital drugs – or "i-dosing" – combine two tones, one played in each ear, to create binaural tones that allegedly alter brain waves to mimic the effects of various drugs. Like to smoke pot but don't want to smoke? Check out a digital weed equivalent. Miss your Eighties coke-snorting days? Check out digital energy. You get the idea.

Apparently administrators at Mustang High School in Oklahoma were first alerted to the existence of the drugs when several teens there were caught appearing to be high. When they were sent to the office they said they'd just i-dosed. This, of course, led to what appears to be, at least as far as news reports go, a general overreaction: "The parents' reaction was the same as mine. Just shocked," Bonnie Lightfood, Mustang School District superintendent told NewsOK.

Shocking. Just shocking. Of course there's not really any proof that the digital drugs actually work. Interestingly, that's a view apparently shared by the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control. The OBN spokesman Mark Woodward told the newspaper that the effect on kids was likely that of a placebo – still, he took advantage of the opportunity to suggest that the use of digital drugs could be a gateway to real drug use. "The bigger concern is if you have a kid wanting to explore this, you probably have a kid that may end up smoking marijuana or looking for bigger things," Woodward said.

Now there's a new one: i-dosing as a gateway drug for the supposed gateway drug marijuana. Of course, its hard to imagine that Woodward has any evidence to back up his speculation. Indeed, although the feds and numerous other narcos far and wide have suggested that marijuana is a gateway drug luring children into use of harder drugs, there remains absolutely no evidence to suggest that is the case. (And, as always, a far more likely gateway drug, if you have to find one to blame, would be alcohol, which is used by many more teens than is marijuana.)