10/29/07 Halloween Lead Hoopla

All this hoopla over Halloween lead hazards! Hogwash if a teeny tiny bit of lead in a costume or candy bucket has got your tail in a knot it might be time for a reality check. Makes you wonder how my parents and grandparents ever survived playing with little lead soldiers and lead toys. Come on, generations of fisherman have bitten down on lead weights and countless game birds served up with lead shot. If you have to worry about something worry about what occurs in the average day of US teenagers. According to the National Survey on Drug Use that included more than 60,000 individuals, on any given day in American 8,000 adolescents drank their first alcohol, 4000 smoked their first cigarette and forty three hundred tried drugs for the first time. So rather than creating a ruckus about a Halloween costume worn for a couple of hours one night or insisting the school cafeteria include organic peas, why not address the truly deadly hazards able to destroy virtually every child in this country irregardless of social or economic status.