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There are a number of YouTube videos of people chopping up and snorting Smarties (candy). Articles state that kids can get nasal maggots from doing this. Regardless of how idiotic this practice may be, nasal maggots smells like a parental scare story to me, and I, for one, am highly skeptical of this; as far as I know, flies lay maggots in rotten flesh, not rotting candy in nasal passages. Smarties are, in the U.S. at least, a brightly-colored, fruit-flavored, pill-sized form of candy produced by the Smarties Candy Company and sold in cellophane-wrapped rolls. (In Canada, Smarties are known as Rockets, and in the UK, Smarties refers to another type of candy entirely, colorful chocolate-coated spheroids similar to M&Ms.) In recent years, news accounts have popped up at various times, reporting (always as a supposedly new trend) fads and epidemics of schoolkids crushing up Smarties and either snorting the resulting powder (i.e., inhaling it into their nasal passages) or smoking it (i.e., putting it in their mouths and attempting to blow it out of their noses), with the Wall Street Journal writing back in March 2009 that: Snorting Smarties is something many youngsters across the years have engaged in once or twice as a lark or a dare. But, as with so many other similar look at this terrible thing kids these days are doing warnings propagated by adults, the instances of kids talking about snorting Smarties, school administrators issuing dire warnings about it, and inventive youngsters posting videos about how to do it all appear to vastly outstrip the real-world incidence of the phenomenon. The latest recurrence of interest in the purported Smarties-snorting craze was prompted by a January 2014 notice issued to parents about this unsafe, new trend among students and the risks thereof by Portsmouth Middle School in Rhode Island: This time around, the penultimate item on that list about the perils of snorting Smarties including nasal scarring, infection, lung irritation, allergic reaction, or possible maggots really caught the public’s attention (even though it had been included in similar news reports published five years earlier). Sucking crushed Smarties into your nose puts you at risk of nasal maggots? Really? Smarties are made of dextrose, citric acid, calcium stearate, various natural and artificial flavors, and food colorings. There’s nothing inherently toxic about them, although snorting anything into one’s nose brings a risk of blockage, infection, and nasal or pulmonary irritation. Contracting maggots from snorting Smarties, however, appears at this point to be little more than a theoretical possibility rather than a documented hazard. The school warning reproduced above listed it among the risks associated with inhaling Smarties smoke or snorting Smarties and referenced Dr. Oren Friedman, a Mayo Clinic nose specialist, on the subject, apparently picking up his having mentioned that risk as a rare possibility in an article published back in 2009: The hard deadlines website queried Friedman on that issue, and he acknowledged that he had not studied Smarties-snorting in particular or ever witnessed a case of Smarties-induced nose maggots, but stated that he had seen maggots in the nose from other food products in general: So yeah, some kids have tried snorting Smarties (and will probably be trying it for as long as Smarties exist), and yes, that practice does have some potential health risks. But snorting Smarties appears to be far more a subject of gossip than actual practice, documented health problems stemming from actual occurrences of it are few and mild, and contracting nasal maggots from it is a remote possibility not yet observed in real life.
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