OPINION: There’s enough TP for everyone to wipe

I remember the Great Toilet Paper shortage of 1973.

I was 14, riding around in the back of my mother’s Chevy Impala while she frantically searched every store in northern New Jersey for toilet paper. My brothers and I fought in the backseat without seatbelts, unable to comprehend her worry.

In those days, toilet paper wasn’t sold in multi-packs. They were all single rolls, paper wrapped.

Why, may you ask, did we have a run on toilet paper during the gas shortage of the early ’70s? Because an ignorant Wisconsin congressman made a comment about a potential shortage of commercial roll tissue. Johnny Carson picked it up off the wire in his evening monologue Dec. 19, 1973. Twenty million people saw the show, told all their friends, and through word of mouth, everyone ran to the stores.

Today we have the most advanced parent roll manufacturing the world has ever seen. Rolls load at 70 mph and are 10 feet long and 8 feet in diameter.

The technology to produce vast quantities of paper products has advanced considerably since the 1970s. Fifty percent of toilet paper is produced from pulp from millions of acres of trees in the southern and northwest forests of America. Factories in other parts of the country use recycled material mixed with virgin pulp to produce toilet paper.

We have more toilet paper than we could possibly ever use. So take a deep breath, stop hoarding and buy as you need based on your bowel movements.