Tobacco.org

• Just Say No....to Smarties? Faux Smoking Has Parents Fuming  

Summit Middle School in Frisco, Colo., is a tobacco-free campus. Students who smoke cigarettes are suspended.

But when a lunchtime crew of sixth-graders last fall started "smoking" Smarties, the tart, chalky candy discs wrapped in cellophane, lunchroom monitors and the school nurse were flummoxed.

The children didn't light the candy. They crushed it into a fine powder in its wrapper, tore off one end, poured the powder into their mouths and blew out fine Smarties dust, mimicking a smoker's exhale.

"It was freaky," says Corinne McGrew, a nurse for Summit School District. "My biggest concern was that they would aspirate the wrapper or a whole Smarties and it would be a choking hazard."

The fad at Summit Middle School died down after a few days and some harsh words from the lunchroom staff. But at other schools and across the Internet, "smoking Smarties," as the activity has been labeled, is gaining popularity. Some children have even taken to snorting it, all to the horror of parents, teachers and the 60-year-old company that manufactures the candy. . . .

"To freak your mom out, sit behind a chair and just blow smoke up in the air with your mom in the room" says YouTube user "SOAD9787" in a smoking-Smarties video he posted Saturday.

Officials at Ce De Candy Inc., the Union, N.J., makers of Smarties, are decidedly opposed to the craze. "It's just dumb," said Eric Ostrow, Ce De's vice president of sales and marketing.

He remembers as a child puffing on candy cigarettes that blew out fake smoke -- a practice that he thinks may have led to years of smoking the real thing. Mr. Ostrow quit smoking in 1994, and Ce De Candy banned smoking at its factory in the early 1980s, long before ostracizing smokers became mainstream, he points out.

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