Kids Chugging Psychedelic OTC Cough Remedies

Didja hear a story last week --perhaps on NPR--about how kids are chugging cough syrup w/dextromethorphan??? Brilliant hallucinations ensue (as I inadvertently discovered one time in Germany).

The commentators were astonished, just shocked, I tell you. The authorities are concerned. Lawmakers have acted. Solons have weighed in.

One only needed to web-search the name of the active ingredient, and it brought up 619,000 'hits', in fractions of a second.

When I was teaching school up north in 2000, I got to know a girl-kid of fantastically mixed heritage (gringo, hispano, indio-of-several-tribes) who laughed and laughed as she told me how she and a couple of her homies would go to the Wal-mart, in Espanola, then go up the aisle, opening and chugging cough syrups, and then putting the empties back in packages back on the shelf...

I checked it out: I went to the Wal-mart in question, and indeed several found packages with empty bottles. I asked an employee if they found many such, and discovered it was very common.; asked him if they knew what the kid told me they were doing, and he looked surprised. But he told me I'd better talk to the manager, if I wanted to know more.

I mentioned it to a counselor at the school and she said she was aware of it, but there was no official plan or policy.

I got to wondering if that wasn't a consequence of the value of those products in the cold-remedy market which has GOT to be worth hundreds of billions of DOLLARS per year...

You couldn't probably prove it, but it sher seems plausible that what we're having here is another of those public good/private profits conflicts which have so fundamentally shaped our private and public lives this last century or so.

PS: The link in the headline is to the "streetdrugs.com" page on DXM...