Opinion | Now that people are cooking chicken in NyQuil, is it time for Canada to ban TikTok?

Working at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration must be surreal.

I can only imagine the marching orders inside the regulatory agency this month: “In addition to updates on the COVID-19 bivalent vaccine, monkeypox, infant formulas, new Nutrition Fact labels and a product recall over listeria, we need to issue a PSA about cooking chicken in NyQuil.”

My faith in humanity keeps getting rocked, one deranged TikTok challenge at a time. Do young people really need to be warned that jamming corncobs onto electric drills is not a sensible way to eat if they plan on keeping their teeth? Has real life morphed into a crossover of “Jackass” and “Idiocracy”?

My parents mostly had to worry about their kids getting good grades and not getting abducted by strangers. Those were the bookends. Parents today need to be vigilant about social media, to be on the lookout for clues their kids might be partaking in the “Skull Breaker Challenge,” “Vampire Fangs Challenge” or “Blackout Challenge.”

The biggest clue? A frantic trip to the ER.

On Thursday, the FDA posted, “A Recipe for Danger: Social Media Challenges Involving Medicines.” It cited a trend that combines poultry and cold medicine. I pity the FDA staffer who will be forced to write future warnings such as, “Please do not marinate ribs with Liquid Advil” and “Cupcakes should NEVER be frosted with Crest Cinnamon Toothpaste.”

As the FDA noted of the NyQuil Chicken Challenge: “Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways. Even if you don’t eat the chicken, inhaling the medication’s vapours while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body.”

The FDA also cited a previous TikTok challenge that had young people taking “dangerously high” amounts of Benadryl to hallucinate. That one resulted in several hospitalizations and, in some cases, death.

In one video I watched on Wednesday, an unseen slacker is frying up his chicken breasts in aquamarine NyQuil. He waxes approvingly about the dizzying fumes. I’ve been studying the Second World War and the Greatest Generation in recent months, and all I kept thinking while watching was: “God help us if there is ever another global conflict. We are doomed.”

Invading tanks will be rolling into our streets and young people will be too busy trying to scale a pyramid of milk crates for views and likes to even notice. Hey! Democracy is a participatory sport. True freedom is not about how you can insanely swerve your car in the “Cha-Cha Slide Challenge.”

That’s the craziest part about these TikTok challenges. They celebrate the lowest common denominator. They revel in recklessness and anti-social behaviour. They nudge young people, who don’t yet have fully formed brains, to abandon any burgeoning calibration of risk and consequence.

The “Coronavirus Challenge” encouraged the random licking of items in public, including airplane toilet seats. The “Penny Challenge” encouraged TikTokers to slip a coin between a partially plugged-in charger and the outlet. The goal was to create an electrical spark.

Based on fire department blotters, it tragically worked.

Since I have a hard rule against writing about the scatological and bodily effluent, I won’t even get into the “Poop Challenge” or “Pee Your Pants Challenge.” Both are disgusting. As was the “Cereal Challenge,” in which a volunteer tilts back their head and opens their mouth, which the challenger then fills with Corn Flakes and milk, before eating out of said mouth.

That’s something to put on your resumé to impress future employers.

Why are there no positive TikTok challenges? How about a Volunteer at a Soup Kitchen Challenge? Or a Get Straight A’s in School Challenge? Hell, I’d be cool with a Make Your Dad a Martini During a Jays Game Challenge.

Right or wrong, I try to offer a humble opinion in this space that is, in some ways, prescriptive. But this is me shrugging today. I don’t know how we fix this. If people want to stand on the sidewalk and stoically stare ahead, not flinching as someone else throws objects off a balcony at their skulls, I really don’t know what to say. If young men are inclined to soak their scrotums in soy sauce to see if this triggers a gustatory sensation on their tongues, man alive, I seriously pray there is never another world war.

I just thought of something prescriptive.

Why is TikTok not banned in the West? That’s where most of these unhinged challenges originate. TikTok is a Chinese company. We already know about that country’s diabolical lunges at industrial espionage, intellectual property looting, academic spying, identity theft, hacking and swaying public opinion.

What better way to destabilize our democracy than to get our future adults to waste their time shoving frankfurters into their ears or riding unicycles over picturesque waterfalls? Have you ever read TikTok’s terms of service? What you are agreeing to is borderline Orwellian. I’m surprised they just don’t demand your social insurance number and blood type.

Even if the end game is not clear in 2022, it seems prudent to consider TikTok a Chinese Trojan Horse. It’s one of the most popular apps on the planet and users are voluntarily surrendering their data.

Would you give your arch enemy your debit card PIN?

It’s time for Canada to take a hardline on TikTok.

We can’t have our young people seasoning poutine with Mr. Clean.

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