(Author's Note: the meat of this article would have appeared as a comment rather than a separate article, but the author of the original post has an unfortunate history of deleting comments of which they don't approve, so I'd rather not take that chance).
I caught a glimpse of an article on "The Early Show" about a "choking game", but it wasn't until I read a JU article about it that I understood the whole deal. Apparently an Idaho boy died while playing a "choking game", hanging himself with the intent of passing out to achieve a "high".
In the wake of this tragedy, all we can do is inform and warn. And that is appropriate. We cannot confiscate the tools children would use for this type of behaviour, because, quite frankly, the tools could be virtually anything.
The lesson we can, and should learn from this is that people who wish to get high will find a means to do so. Whether it's an ingestion of nutmeg, a choking game, huffing, or any other number of ways to use legal substances to achieve a desired effect, people will do it. And, in some cases, as has been repeatedly proven, they will turn to illicit agents to obtain what they desire.
The drug trade is an industry whose annual "take" rivals that of retail giants such as Wal-Mart. It can't do that without a massive workforce and massive financial means. And it won't be stopped by passage of increasingly stringent regulation or incarceration of end users for lengthy prison sentences. It can, in fact, be better controlled if its usage is highly regulated and prices set low enough to remove profitability from black market dealers.
The death of this Idaho boy, as with any death, is very tragic. But there are lessons that we can learn from it that can benefit us as a society. One of those lessons is the fact that we cannot continue our course of simply outlawing every behaviour or activity we deem inappropriate. We must pursue a far more reasonable course of educating and informing the public. An educated populace is far less likely to act stupidly.