Wow. Just… wow.
Story here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21678196/
Is it just CHINA that all this shit is happening to? Are they that malevolent or industrially lazy that they make poisonous toys? Or is it just that everything made seems to come from China and so mistakes that would have come from Italy, Taiwan or Zimbabwe just come from China instead?
Crap, now you just know some assholes are going to be buying these as ready-made date rape pills. 
Wow…
This sort of thing is simply terrifying to me as a parent. I don’t buy my son many toys (he seems to collect them anyway, thanks to Grandpa), but it can be hard to find ones that aren’t made in China (off the top of my head, Playmobil and Lego? That’s all I can think of and neither of which do I think are quite age appropriate for mine yet, soon but maybe not this Christmas).
This year my son is going to be getting more old fashioned toys from me (gotta hit the craft fairs for wooden toys since I don’t have the tools, and I’m making him some finger puppet sets myself…)
Just getting your date to eat the necklace you bought her will be tricky.
I somehow doubt that it was malevolent. Industrially lazy? I sort of doubt that, too. Even if an industry is doing all it can to prevent the sale of unsafe products, I can’t really picture the R&D department testing a toy to see if it turns into a date rape drug. Why would it occur to them? Has this been a historic problem with beads in the past?
I’m just glad no one was killed.
You really need to familiarize yourself with the concept of candy necklaces.
When this story aired on the news last night, my little girl whirled around to look at her Mom. Mommy said “It’s alright, I’ve just thrown them out.”
I think I’ll get rid of the guns in the house and just combat intruders with toys labeled “Made in China”.
*What’d you get your buck with, Jimmy? Winchester? Remmington?
No… Mattel.*
I was wondering how long it would take to come up with a marketing idea. 
Most of my dates can tell the difference between candy and plastic.
Most of them, he says.
I also don’t think it’s malevolent but I’m quite sure it’s laziness - on the part of the CEOs or owners or whatever. The peons don’t get paid much and from all I’ve heard China is shitty for worker’s rights.
What is the majority of ‘zero’?
“China” does everything it can to keep costs down and there isn’t nearly enough governmental regulation.
Lead paint is cheeper than other paint. I’m sure they found this stuff cheeper then the stuff they normally/should have used.
The thing is, it’s not the actual chemicals on the beads. The GHB is not synthesized until it is metabolized. IANAChemist or Biologist, but it seems to me that this isn’t a problem that could have been foreseen, and there may be some time before the actual chemical in question is identified.
I don’t mean they should have found this specific problem. I mean they don’t spend more on R&D then they have to and sometimes not even that much.
Zebra unless you are trying to be funny, which is possible, it’s CHEAP. “Cheep” is the noise birds make.
P’raps not, but the chems you use on TOYS should be assumed to have a risk of ingestion, because kids, you know, EAT toys. Have they no rats in China, or prisoners, or their own children* to feed the toys to so they can see if something odd, like spontaneous DEATH happens to them?
I could call this an accident because, wow, accidents happen. But then there’s this whole lead paint thing, which has been a no-no in toy manufacture for a LONG time. There seems to be some serious disregard for the end consumer that They need to overcome. Or more specifically, we need for Them to overcome.
*an admittedly ignorant and awful thing to say, sorry 'bout that.
Holy shit. I have five boxes of these things in my closet, wrapped and labeled for Christmas gifts for my daughter, niece and three friends’ kids. Thank you so much for posting this thread!
What stinks is that this is a really cool product, and one of the creative non-blinky non-beeping toys that I really like. It’s been really hyped up in the Overachieving Parents genre of magazines already for the Christmas season. But, uh, no, not worth the risk of someone swallowing a bead (or, who knows - is the stuff ingestible just by putting your hands in your mouth after touching them for awhile?)
I agree. I don’t think we can really point and yell at China for this one - it’s a weird, crazy fluke that this chemical is changed within the body and happens to turn into GHB.
The body has a ton of enzymes, which can work on a ton of chemicals, and turn them into a ton of things. I’m having a hard time imagining any R&D department, not just in China, being that thorough about every single chemical that’s put into their products. Not to mention the fact that different people metabolize things differently. Maybe they should more thorough, I don’t know exactly what the official rules are, but this particular case seems more like an accident than anything else.
A little digging showed me that it’s not as accidental as we might like to believe.
From here:
Had they been made with the proper pentanediol, there likely would have been no problem. At some point the company decided to cheap out and use the butanediol because Hey! What’s one carbon, more or less?
So yes, we can yell at a company that swaps out for a known dangerous chemical to save a buck.
Yep. At no point during it’s industrialization process did firms in the US/West every make any products that are dangerous to children when ingested.
While it is not necessary that the number of recalls associated with Chinese manufacturing actually reflects any particular character flaw in the country as a whole, when you are buying things which could provide a vector for harmful substances, and you don’t have a degree in biochemistry, the “Made in China” tag will have to do.
If the China government wants the label to stop being a warning label, that is a decision they will have to make, and make soon, and back it up with extremely proactive measures. Just hanging a few corporate scapegoats won’t do. Mostly people don’t care who’s fault it is, they just need to feel confident in their choices of products. When Tylenolsup[/sup] killed people the Johnson & Johnson folks took the hit and destroyed all the Tylenolsup[/sup] in existence at that time, and implemented new procedures to protect their consumers, and the value of the brand name. It cost them a fortune, but it was the best possible decision to make. China now faces that same decision.
You have to understand that the consumer cannot be wrong in the matter of what level of reliability is acceptable. You want to sell, you meet the level of quality required.
Tris