This article was sent to us by a concerned friend. We'd like to assure our worried readers that no one, but no one, pushes Mr. Happy Crack.




Kids Busted Pushing 'Happy Crack' | Sploid, 5/18/06

The candied crack craze continues to blaze across the country. This week it claimed another 14 kids in Pennsylvania.

The kids call it "happy crack." Little bags of powder, a potent mix of Kool-Aid and sugar, that guarantees its user a rush like no other. It's been making the rounds at Shenandoah Elementary School. Administrators have finally busted the ring of dealers, handing out three-day suspensions to 24 of them.

The pushers' parents are furious.

"I have no intentions whatsoever of letting thing like this haunt my child," said parent Denise Brown Bey. "The principal did inform me that it was more than just my child. So my outrage is not simply because of my child but because of all of the children."

Bey fails to see the inherent danger of kids pushing this volatile concoction. She's more concerned with her child's future.

"If you see it in writing, he was suspended for 'Happy Crack,' and if you don't know what that is, lots of people will assume it's an illegal substance," she said.

School board member Erin Vecchio's children used to have a problem with Happy Crack. She believes it should be decriminalized.

"My own kids used to make it at school. It's Kool-Aid and sugar," said Erin Vecchio, a school board member. "It's colored. It doesn't look like drugs. It looks like Pixy Stix. I didn't find anything wrong with it."

Penn Hills Superintendent Patricia Gennari refused to comment on the suspension other than to cite school policy.

"The Penn Hills School District's controlled substances policy strictly prohibits, look-alike drugs and particularly the mimic of use and mimic of sale of these substances. The replication of the sale of drugs is a behavior that we cannot foster in our schools."

Last week a child at the same school was suspended for bringing a squirt gun to school.