One Stray Pea

So a few weeks ago the news had some breaking news to share with us. Kids are using cold medicines to get high, or as a pharmacology professor I had referred to it, kids are “gettin’ crazy on the grape!”. This means kids are drinking Dimetap, for those of us who don’t get crazy on the grape. Actually, when she said that some girl laughed and announced, rather loudly, “I used to do that!!” I thought our professor was going to have an aneurysm, and I kind of wish she had, it would’ve made class much more interesting.

What I want to know is why this is news. Kids have been using various cough syrups and cold medicines to get high for well over 10 years now. Coricidan HBP is the culprit being blamed for two junior high age kids taking a trip to the ER this past month. Pharmacists say there needs to be more control over Coricidan. When I worked at Meijer as your friendly (ha!) Health and Beauty associate we had our own way of controlling the Coricidan and the “dex” as the kids call it these days. We just took it off the shelf and handed it out by request. We put some in the pharmacy because the seemed a good way to control it, and the elderly seemed to go there first anyways. Then we kept a healthy stash in the back so we could secretly take the whole package ourselves! Just kidding, but we were pretty tired of those blasted kids stealing our goods.

A personal story to drive my point home. So one night I was working by myself and I was unhappily restocking the cough & cold section of all the Sudafed the meth-heads had stolen in order to support their own habit. By the way, if you have orange, rotted teeth and you ask me for Sudafed, I know what you’re doing with it. You’re not fooling anyone. Anyways, there I am, stocking and singing that Hero song by Enrique Iglesias (don’t hate, you learn to love it when it’s all you hear) and this over-active, jittery teenager wanders up to me and he’s twitching and can’t maintain eye contact to save his life. I’m already thinking “cracked out” and he points to the empty space where Coricidan HBP is supposed to live and the conversation went like this:
Cracked out jitterbug (COJB)- “You got any of this in the back”
Me - (looks around to make sure he’s talking to me because he’s looking all over the place) - “Nope”
COJB - “I need it”
Me - “sorry”
COJB - “No, I really need it. My mom has high blood pressure”
Me - “sorry”
COJB - “I really really need it. My mom could die”
Me - “I could check, but we don’t have it. And your mom is not going to die”
COJB - “She might”
Me -”sorry”

In the end he twitched off, probably across the street to Wal-Mart. What has the world come to when kids are more interested in stealing cold medicine & cough syrup than condoms?

Filed under: Nonsense on May 22nd, 2007