Choke me

From the Toronto Star:

Chasing cheap highs, tens of thousands of Ontario adolescents are strangling themselves or each other in what's known as the choking game, a report out of Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health says.

The report says as many as 7 per cent of Ontario students – some 79,000 – between grades 7 and 12 will have played the game, which is often prolonged to the point of fainting and is blamed for at least 82 deaths in the United States since the mid-1990s.

Even when I was a dumb teenager – and choking highs were a six-month fad – I thought the whole thing was stupid. Hilarious, but stupid. I remember being at a house party and watching two drunken 15-year-olds earnestly trying to make each other pass out. I couldn't breathe either – from laughing so hard. One of the most ludicrous sights I've ever seen. I said then, and I saw now: what happened to good, old-fashioned glue huffing?