Those Darn Kids Will Try Anything
January 9, 2008 by Liberty Kontranowski
Filed under A Mother's Wisdom, Addiction, Boys & Girls, Children, Drugs, Medicine
Gone are the days of ’shrooms and mouthwash, I guess. Have you heard what the kids of today are getting high on now? Freakin’ cough syrup! Can you believe that?
It’s true, according to the US Government. About 3.1 million people between the ages of 12 and 25 have gotten their kicks from cough and cold medicine. Oy. This number is in line with the amount who use LSD, and is far greater than those in this age group who use methamphetamines. In fact, more than 5 percent of teens and young adults have admitted to dizzying up on cold remedies.
Not surprisingly, these are also the same stand-up citizens who experiment regularly with illicit drugs, according to a 2006 survey. And what’s more, nearly 82 percent of these fine folks have also sparked a doob, as in smoked some good old fashioned weed. Why is none of this surprising me?
It seems that the suppressant of choice is DXM (dextromethorphan) which, when ingested in large amounts, can cause disorientation, blurred vision, slurred speech and vomiting. Good times, eh? Those tipping back the (medicine) bottle this past year included 2.1 percent of whites, 1.4 percent of Hispanics and 0.6 percent of blacks.
So this is all great news for parents, I know. Just one more thing to have to police with your teens. Now if they suddenly seem to be “sick” more often than normal, padlock the medicine cabinet and hide the White-Out. Oh wait, White-Out was from my era. Heh.
Source: cnn.com
“Among those tipping back the (medicine) bottle this past year, 2.1 percent were white, 1.4 percent were Hispanic and 0.6 percent were black.”
Um, what were the other 95.9 percent?
Aliens.
Kidding.
Actually, the original quote from CNN read like this: “…the rate of past year misuse among whites was 2.1 percent, which was three times higher than the level for blacks, 0.6 percent, and also significantly higher than the level for Hispanics, 1.4 percent.”
So, I’ll go clean that up in the post. Thanks for pointing that out Marky and sorry for any confusion.
The effects of DXM are similar to ketamine and PCP. All of these are disassociative anesthetics. At sufficiently high doses, the user completely loses touch with his/her body. The brain quickly fills in the blanks: hence, extreme hallucinations follow. Very dangerous without careful supervision.
Perhaps the greatest danger, however, is that some young people–having discovered they enjoy the effects–won’t be selective about which OTC drug containing DXM they use.
If they use a cough syrup containing no active ingredients other than DXM, the effects will (hopefully) be psychological and temporary.
But downing multiple bottles of cough syrups which contain other ingredients–such as antihistamines or decongestants–can lead to overdose, i.e. serious illness or death.
Which leads to the usual irresolvable debate over “harm reduction” vs. “just say no”.
Charles – so it seems again that the problem is authority (even though DXM is a completely legal substance) doing its best to stop harm reduction. Well played there…
DXM itself is a relatively safe drug with enjoyable effects.
purecaff: agreed. One approach is to attempt to prevent kids from tripping on DXM: but no matter how extreme and coercive the effort, some will try it anyway. We might as well give them the info they need: so that when they do make this choice, they’ll be much less likely to wind up in the hospital (or worse).
A truly free society would not prevent people from making decisions about what they do with their bodies and minds, nor would it suppress information about entheogenic experience. Rather than enable informed individual choices, we enforce prohibition and ignorance. Someday we’ll wonder how we caused so much misery & blamed the victims of irrational public policy, having ignored the fact that humans always have, and always will find ways to alter consciousness. It wouldn’t be so prevalent if it weren’t a deep human need (not 100% but very widespread)
I tried DXM once. Didn’t take enough to fully disassociate. Enjoyed listening to music for the 1st hour. Then I saw a photo of myself as a child, who seemed to be trying to talk with me. I began to cry & spent much of the rest of the time trying to put my feelings into words (which came out like a prose poem, in one friend’s opinion)
Another thing we should be telling young people is this: you’re much more likely to have a bad trip if you have emotional problems, unresolved trauma…and/or a history of anxiety, depression, or other mental illness. I learned this the hard way. This advice would apply to other “psychedelics” not just DXM.
My subjective experience, by analogy: LSD is like looking through a microscope, while DXM is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Intriguing experience: definitely learned from it, but not eager to repeat it.
I LOVE DXM BABY