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US, Aussie Officials Yank GHB-Producing Toys
theodp writes "Questioned about concerns over China-made toys, Toys 'R' Us CEO Jerry Storch predicted 'this will be the safest holiday season ever.' Oops. On the same day Storch's interview ran in Fortune, Toys 'R' Us joined other North American and Australian retailers to pull millions of Chinese-made toy bead sets from shelves after scientists found they contain a chemical that when ingested metabolizes into GHB, the date-rape drug gamma hydroxy butyrate. Two children in the US and three in Australia were hospitalized after swallowing the beads."
Where can we buy the beads ?
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Fun Toy Banned Because of Three Stupid Dead Kids
Monstar L
"bat an eyebrow"
This sounds like a technique worth learning.
Never understood the correlation between beads and flashing breasts until now ...
I used to take it all the time and I never got raped once.
"Hopefully they'll reformulate them"
Surely they will. No doubt with something much safer... lead perhaps.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
From the Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_Dots/ "The toy was supposed to contain the non-toxic chemical 1,5-pentanediol, but instead contains 1,4-butanediol, which is metabolised into the drug gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB)." It looks like it's not a design mistake, but the manufacturer replacing one substance with a cheaper version
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
GHB isn't *the* date rape drug. It's use, actually is primarily recreational (and, *no*, date rape is *not* recreation). Loss of conciousness is actually a rarity.
I heard this on the news last night and thought "Oh, they're tainted with rohypnol". When I read this article this morning, I saw that it was GHB.
Again, the media demonizing and misclassifying drugs. I'm not saying that GHB is good. Don't get me wrong at all. But the whole misclassification of things confuses parents, makes kids crave the stuff more, and generally, in it's lowest form, is misinformation.
And we know how slashdot folks hate sensationalized misinformation, right?
The older I get, the less I like everyone else.
No matter what the product, Chinese manufacturers will always cut every corner they can.
Toothpaste: Substituting poisonous glycol (anti-freeze) for other sugary chemicals
Cough syrup: Ditto
Paint: Using lead
Painted toys: lead
Capacitors: Using stolen formulas and producing incomplete electrolytes taht cause the capacitors to fail, leak or explode.
Toys: substituting cheaper butanediol (which turns into the date-rape drug GHB) for more expensive pentanediol
More difficult than it sounds, and it would all be SO much simpler if China actually had a justice system worth a damn. As it is right now a company has a VERY hard time getting sued - every judge gets bribed, and there's more loyalty from them towards domestic businesses than seemingly hostile foreign influences. Their whole judiciary is a gigantic joke, the concept of rule of law does not apply in that country, except when the ruling party wants to apply it towards their own ends.
Even if a company is successfully sued, the way their system works allows the same group of people to simply close up shop, move a few blocks down, and continue from where they left off. It's practically impossible for any PERSONAL responsibility to be exacted unless the situation erupts into a full-scale international debacle (like this one), where the government will actually step in.
And if you think we have it bad, imagine the Chinese consumer. They don't just get to deal with shady manufacturers, but shady designs in the first place! Few people fully realize the intricacy and importance of proper engineering until it bites them in the ass like this. Welcome America, to the Wal Mart future you created for yourself by being a bunch of damn cheap bastards who would rather buy cheap shit than pay for quality and durability.
A better question is: did they even care?
There seem to be an awful lot of such incidents lately, involving swapped materials, ranging from poisonous toys to ethilene glycol in toothpaste to exploding lithium ion batteries, all coming from China. I'm sorry, but that's no longer looking like isolated "oopsie" cases where someone forgot to do their research. It starts to look like they have a whole culture based on not doing that research at all, or plain old not care as long as they can pocket the difference.
I mean in this case one might even argue that they didn't research what it decomposes into, but other cases involved such blatant cases as:
- lead paint, which is _known_ to be toxic. You don't have to research what it metabolizes into, it's just toxic as it is.
- ethilene glycol, a known poison, used instead of the more expensive glycerine in toothpaste
- the membrane which should collapse and open the circuit when a battery overheats, replaced with much cheaper stuff that doesn't. It doesn't take that much research to understand why it's there, and why a battery without that safety can burst into flames.
Etc.
In fact, I'll venture a guess and say what it really reminds me of: corruption and kleptocracy. Now I don't have any first-hand experience with China, but I've seen cases in other places, and, honestly, the more I hear about such Chinese manufacturing incidents, the more it starts to sounds like that.
The way that works is, sorta, along the lines of "it doesn't matter how much you're paid, it matters how much you can steal / embezzle / demand in bribes / etc". Whole pyramids get built where any good job (judged through the aforementioned criterion) is either given to relatives of party officials, or essentially auctioned to whoever gave a bigger bribe. Then essentially the winner is inoffficially _expected_ to get that money back with interest, by abusing that function to take more bribes or plain old steal.
In which case, the way it would go, isn't even that some ruthless capitalist wanted to cut production costs, gain a competitive advantage and invest it in some form or shape into expanding his operations. It's probably just some private guy along the chains who switched materials and pocketed the money. It's not the evils of capitalism, it's plain old the evils of unchecked corruption.
Especially the communist block generated quite a few such structures, which is why I wonder about China.
Actually, I'll give you one more reason why I worry about China. Because they have a whole _surrealistic_ history of just that.
If you look as far back in time as the Battle of the Yalu River, you'll find such surrealistic stuff as that many shells used by the Chinese fleet were filled with sawdust or cement, because some enterprising souls in the navy had embezzeled the funds for cordite and split the loot with the manufacturer. Or stuff as monumentally surrealistic as that a battleship was missing two main guns, which again had been stolen and sold on the black market. If you didn't go "WTBF?!" already, read it again and roll it a bit in your head. Big Fucking Guns, off a battleship, stolen and sold on the black market.
At this point, I'm sure someone will point out that it's been more than a century since then, and China did have two (or arguably even 3) changes of regime and direction in the meantime. But did the culture change in that time? Because from where I stand, it doesn't look that way. The corruption of the Qing empire continued seamlessly into the surrealistic warlord era during Chiang Kai-shek's regime, which in turn continued seamlessly into the corrupt regime under Mao. And now we have arguably the same guys who enriched themselves during the communism, and not by honest means either (the official salaries of government offi
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