Pulling tabs or pulling my leg

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

In a previous column Cecil debunked the urban legend about pull tab redemption for kidney dialysis:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_077.html
Up until a few days ago, I had no reason to doubt this. However, a friend of mine was collecting pull tabs for his sister’s dialysis. “I thought that was urban legend”, I cautiously said. Then he went into a long and passionate tirade about how the National Kidney Foundation and Reynolds Aluminum had caused a lot of problems by claiming that there was no such program, but that the program was really with the American Kidney Fund and Alcoa - and that it’s real. He seemed dead serious and he had collected about a thousand pull tabs from around the office. I decided against mentioning that Cecil had pointed out that there was no need for outside funds for kidney dialysis due to medicare, insurance, and state assistance…

Instead I went home and did some web research. I found no confirmation on either the American Kidney Fund web site or the Alcoa web sites. However he continues to be quite insistent that the debunking is wrong and that his very real sister gets very real kidney dialysis from pull tab redemptions.

Is this just a persistent hoaxter, a very gullible brother (very unlikely, this guy is really sharp), or is there possibly some element of truth to the matter?

2

People don’t always think rationally when a loved one is suffering.

Ask the guy where he brings the pull tabs. The fact that no one I knew who saved these things knew what to do with them tipped me off to the fact that this story was fishy back in my college days.

3

In this article from The Daily Beacon (the editorially independent student newspaper of the University of Tennessee), a certain Paige Turner writes

You know this Paige Turner is a sharp cookie because the article also cites Cecil Adams.

It would probably be pretty easy to get the straight dope from Alcoa.

Alcoa contact information
Alcoa
201 Isabella Street at the 7th Street Bridge
Pittsburgh, PA 15212-5858
USA
Phone: (412) 553-4545

4

Lance:

According to his ‘testimony’, he gives them to his sister who takes them with her to her dialysis treatment. I thought about challenging the sister, but decided that this might be in bad taste.

Which is really where I’m coming from. Is it possible that Alcoa decided that you can’t keep a good news story down and sometime in the last 6 years decided to make donations to the American Kidney Fund? Maybe it used to be urban legend and now it’s the genuine article???

I’m still skeptical… but hedging a bit…

5

By the way, the column can also be found on pages 77-78 of Cecil Adams’ book “Retuurn of the Straight Dope”.

JoeyBlades, I imagine it would be very easy for you to find the straight dope. Call ALCOA at the number listed below and ask them.