Since some idiot teenagers decided to eat tide pods the world has been in a frenzy about the safety of the laundry detergent packets. The ‘challenge’ has gained so much momentum that two New York state lawmakers are introducing a bill to make the strongly concentrated packs look less attractive.
According to WAMC, “Assemblywoman Arabella Simotas and Senator Brad Hoylman both have young children at home. They say they worry about the attractiveness of the laundry pods, that are brightly colored green, blue and purple, and in some cases smell just like candy, but if ingested can cause severe internal burns and poisoning.”
Source: Giphy
Welcome to 2018, where teens know how to operate phones, computers, and navigate the internet (most better than their parents do) but they can’t figure out that eating laundry detergent can actually kill you and probably taste disgusting. And what’s even worse is that people are actually blaming Tide, rather than admitting that their kid is easily influenced and should probably get off the internet.
According to NPR, over 130 poisonings due to “intentional exposures” to laundry packets, Tide or others, were reported to the Poison Control Center in January alone. That’s compared to the 53 cases the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported for all of 2017, which also mostly involved teenagers.
When this problem was with babies, it made sense. A baby could easily mistake a pod for a teething toy or candy and Tide handled that by creating the child lock packaging and warning parents to keep them high up on shelves. Now that the problem has shifted to teenagers, it’s simply ridiculous. There is no reason that anyone over the age of 10 should think eating laundry detergent is okay. There have been lotions and chapsticks that smell like cookies or smoothies but no one ate those, and if someone did it wouldn’t be blamed on Vaseline, Jergens, Bath & Body Works or Chapstick.
I truly don’t know if the parent or the child is more to blame here but either way, it’s not Tide’s responsibility to give someone enough sense to know laundry detergent isn’t edible. No matter how many views it gets you should know better, and should also be raising your child to no matter what their friends or people on the internet are doing.
These are trying times but, no matter rough it gets, ingesting a Tide Pod is not the answer! If you do find yourself craving a poison-filled laundry pack, try a Tide Pod donut, concha, or pizza first, to spare yourself from internal burns.