“Teenagers ‘bagging’ mothballs to get high,” CNN reports:
The 18-year-old French woman was hospitalized with scaly skin on her legs and hands, appearing unsteady and mentally sluggish, doctors said. … Several days later, doctors discovered the cause: a bag of mothballs stashed in her hospital room.
The teenagers had been using the mothballs to get high, inhaling air from the bag for about 10 minutes a day because classmates had recommended it. The sicker of the young women also had been chewing half a mothball a day for two months.
“The only proof we had that she had any functioning brain cells at all was when we asked her if a state should regulate gasoline,” her doctor said. “She looked up and whispered, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.'”
Well, OK, so I made that last paragraph up.