What's "really happening" is not in line with how it's being reported. It's being reported like the Tide Pod thing, which was (surprise, surprise) 99% made-up w

What's "really happening" is not in line with how it's being reported. It's being reported like the Tide Pod thing, which was (surprise, surprise) 99% made-up with a nugget of truth (which was not enough material to drive months of coverage, certainly) at the core, while news organizations pointedly failed to look into it (the actual news, to the extent there is any, isn't that teenagers were doing it—which barely happened—but that toddlers and old people with dementia eat them at many times the rate of what was happening in that not-actually-a-fad—but "people without full mental faculties sometimes consume cleaning products" isn't a story, it's just normal life). Yes, of course fent is dangerous. Yes, if a kid finds a little in an AirBnB and ingests it, that could kill them. The angle the news is taking is largely bullshit, though, and it's bullshit very much on purpose, like all the other times this happens. They're not doing it to inform. [EDIT] The most important aspect of how the media are covering this is probably that their focus is on stories (real or otherwise) that will tend to get the broad, dull middle class to support more import enforcement—not on coverage that might, say, tend to build support for proven harm-reduction like safe use sites w/ drug purity testing and distributing narcan more widely. Evidently, that stepped-up import enforcement largely stops other drugs—like asthma medicine. Which raises the very real possibility that this panic and the tone & shape it's taken—which, again, isn't promoting actual safety for the people most-affected by this—is driven, at least in part, by trade interest groups & their PR firms/departments.