Condom Snorting Challenge: Latest Video Craze Is Just Plain Wrong

The latest internet video challenge takes such an unexpected turn into the bizarre that you’ll long for the days when kids only snorted Fun Dip. Brace yourself. You’ll not be soon rid of the mental picture we're about to paint of your college son or daughter inhaling a condom with the force of an industrial grade vacuum until eventually spitting it out.

We didn’t make this up. The internet did, with its endless currency of likes, thumbs up and shares to measure popularity. The more peculiar the challenge, the greater the internet validation. It doesn’t get much stranger than snorting condoms.

It's not going to make sex any safer. And in every other respect, it’s a colossally bad idea.

It shouldn’t take an ear, nose and throat specialist, or even a small-animal vet, to point that out. But it would also seem obvious that eating toxic Tide Pods is a bad idea, too, so let’s not leave anything to chance. Snorting condoms is stupid. There is nothing that can be said in the defense of snorting condoms that will make it less stupid.

Bruce Y. Lee, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health, wrote in Forbes that snorting condoms — or anything that isn’t prescribed by a doctor — can “damage of the sensitive inner lining of your nose, cause an allergic reaction, or result in an infection.”

“Even if you manage to successfully pull the condom through your mouth,” he wrote, “inhaling a condom up your nose would be very uncomfortable and potentially quite painful.”

Any questions?

In San Antonio, Texas, drug and alcohol prevention educator Stephen Enriquez is including material about condom snorting and other dangerous video challenges in his presentation to parents, he told KABB-TV

"Because these days our teens are doing everything for likes, views, and subscribers," Enriquez told the station. "As graphic as it is, we have to show parents because teens are going online looking for challenges and recreating them."

All potential condom snorters should probably read up on a 27-year-old woman who accidentally inhaled a condom whose case was profiled in a 2004 report in the Indian Journal of Chest Diseases and Allied Sciences. The condom went down her trachea and, shudder, into her lungs, where it blocked an airway. She developed pneumonia. The right upper lobe of her lung collapsed.

Why would you do this to yourself on purpose? Keep using condoms, but as they’re intended. If you even think about snorting them, you’re not ready for parenthood.

Photo via Shutterstock