The Smurf Syndrome

August 8th, 2007

Do not adjust your monitors. What you are seeing is correct. The picture above shows Stan Jones, a Libertarian US Senate candidate, taken in 2002. Contrary to what you might expect, this isn’t about a genetic condition – I wouldn’t be so cruel. In fact, Jones’ unusual skin colour is entirely down to his diet – namely his ill-advised consumption of home-made nutritional supplement, colloidal silver. Properly made, colloidal silver is a power antibiotic, used in antiquity for disinfecting wounds. Jones, believing the the turn of the century would herald untold civil unrest (and therein a stark lack of antibiotics), started brewing his own medications in preparation for the Y2K meltdown. Unfortunately he didn’t follow proper protocol, as Wikipedia states:

[Stan Jones] later revealed that he had used many techniques which are generally considered unwise by colloidal-silver producers, some of which were: (1) The use of mineral-rich well water, which likely caused the production of various, unpredictable silver compounds; (2) the addition of salt as an accelerant, which likely caused the production of the compound, silver chloride; (3) unusually long production times, which likely produced unusually high concentrations; and (4) the lack of filtering, which likely caused him to ingest a lot of non-soluble silver compounds.

These conditions, twinned with Jones’ predilection for drinking his mixture rather than using it to treat external wounds, led to the condition known as argyria, a permanent blue-grey colouring of the skin. Jones insists that he is otherwise healthy, and even had to defend himself during campaigning from accusations that he was using his unusual skin colour as a gimmick. Which would be almost as stupid as drinking toxic amounts of silver instead of stockpiling Novamox.

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