Actually, I think it’s the opposite; they’re doing the best they can to mask the horrible DXM taste with something that’s even stronger, but not quite as nasty.
One time during my teens, I cut open a Vick’s Cough Cap to see what the liquid inside tasted like. A single drop on my tongue made me puke all over myself. It was absolutely the most vile thing I’ve ever tasted.
And I’ll echo what fetus said about 4 ounces not being a terribly large dose. I used to swig the 8 ounce bottles. I found that I threw up about an hour after ingestion whether I drank the liquid or took caps, so I’d just buy whatever was cheaper. My method for getting the syrup down was to hold my nose while I drank it to dull the taste and to always do the whole thing in one go. I found that once I’d already drank some that there was no way in hell I was going back for a second sip after I already had that taste in my mouth.
I used to work for a fella who was in the Navy in th eseventies. He said chugging Navy cough syrup in one of those radar trucks, looking at all the blinking lights, and listening to Frampton Comes Alive was a cosmic experience.
When I was in college, I had a horrid cough, to the point where it was interrupting classes. One night I had to go to a poetry reading and I could not keep my cough under control. I ended up taking about half a bottle of Robitussin.
All I can remember is the feeling like my head was a million miles higher than my legs. I could not feel the pavement under my feet as I walked. It was incredibly strange but yet somewhat enjoyable. And I must say, I did not interrupt the reading with my coughing. I was higher than a kite, but I did not cough a bit.
Man, why all the hating about the flavor of Robitussin? I love it. Maybe I should go try robotripping just to get some delicious Robitussin. (For the record, I also like the cherry Eclipse gum, which tastes almost just like it.)
In college a friend of mine and I extracted the DXM out of Robotussin. That stuff is just god awful. In order to get it down, first you drank a glass of very very very dark think chocolate milk, then you take the shot of DXM and the quickly put a big spoonful of toothpaste in your mouth. Even with all that, it was still pretty bad. The whole thing was probably as bad as drinking the bottle, but this way it was over in a matter of seconds instead of working on the bottle for a few minutes.
Yanno, if some of you wanna Pit me for caring about the young men (and women) I see fucking up their lives every day, as they go past my checkout with their various addictions (tobacco, meth, crack, Robitussin, alcohol), you go right ahead.
He looked like a nice young man. I have a son his age. I have two daughters who are also “young adults”. Every time I card someone for Robitussin who turns out to be my kids’ age, I I feel bad for the kid across the counter from me who is wasting his life. Somewhere he has parents who, when he was five, didn’t expect him to grow up to be abusing drugs.
Not the ones who chug a whole bottle in public. That’s a person looking for a serious robo-blasting. And someone who is most likely headed for a diagnosis of chemical dependency. Social users of OTC cough syrup don’t generally chug it in public.
Shiy drug, shiy high. IMHO. But I’ve done a lot of personal comparison research. (None since 1990, thankfully.)
Yeah, but Duck Duck said she felt bad whenever she carded someone who turned out to be her kid’s age because she didn’t like the idea of her child being a drug user. The guy who was chugging the bottle in the OP was, but not every person her child’s age buying cough medicine is a drug addict.
That’s actually the whole reason cough syrup exists. The original cough medicine was OTC heroin (cocaine for those nasty colds), which worked. Then people realized that customers were getting high on it, so that was replaced by OTC codeine pills, which also worked. People realized that customers were getting high on that too, so they replaced that with an OTC codeine syrup that was specifically created to be as unpleasant as possible, so that nobody would take enough to get high. Surprise! People still did it. Next came dextromethorphan syrup (much of which now contains guiafenasin or other things that are not so fun at the whole-bottle level), the wonder “non-narcotic” cough syrup. Technically it wasn’t a narcotic (narcotic = opiates, in the only meaningful definition of the word, which has since been generalized by police departments everywhere to mean illegal drugs in general). But it still got people high, and it didn’t particularly work all that well in its intended function. Presumably, the manufacturers, the government, etc. threw up their hands and said “We give up. They’re going to get high. Let’s just try to make it a little more difficult.”
Why go to all the bother to stop someone from enjoying themselves for a nice afternoon? The original reasons have probably been forgotten, replaced as they were by absurd platitudes about saving the children’s innocence and whatnot. As it stands, though, DXM is a perfectly legitimate psychedelic trip for a cheap (or poor) adult, and if it were my son I’d rather he do that than wander into the black market of completely-illegal drugs. YMMV.
Heh. Are you sure it was a trip?
FTR, I almost always took caps, and I never threw up. But then, I spaced the ingestion of the caps out so that it took 30 minutes to an hour to get all of them down, on top of some food (nothing too greasy). I did the syrup a handful of times because it was cheaper, but I found that was a mistake. Tasted awful, and even though I never puked on that either, I certainly felt like I would a few times. Though as others have noted, there isn’t an additive that makes you puke, anymore; you’re just fairly likely to toss because of all that nasty syrup floating around in your gut.
This is called the “robowalk” in DXM parlance. It was one of my favorite things about it.
If you “cared” about him so much, why were you so overjoyed that he took a big dose of guiafenasin, which is certainly less pleasant (if not worse for you in the short term) than the stuff he “wanted” at that level?
Really? That’s not the impression I got from the OP:
I’m so glad that Super Wal-Mart Cashier Mom is out there spreading joy and niceness to the nice young men of Decatur!
I don’t think price has that much to do with it. Last time I took acid, it was $5.00 for a hit. Wal/robotussin is about that. I think it has more to do with how easy it is to get, and well, it’s different then acid.
I knew a fella in town a few years ago who got most of his exercise walking to different drug stores. He could only get so much robo from one store during X amount of time so he would need to go to a different store later in the week. As he was guzzling some and telling me about it I adopted a condescending attitude that rapidly dissipated as I looked down and realized I was guzzling PBR’s while talking to him. To each their own…
Okay, so maybe it isn’t just the tweakers who fucked up buying Sudafed for the rest of us, but they sure as hell helped. My husband used to be a prosecutor in San Bernardino County, CA, and they were busting an average of one huge-scale meth lab per day in the county (1998-1999). One house they saw was two feet deep in empty Sudafed blister-packs.
All of the ingredients are pretty easy to get, if you know the wrong people.
But yeah, I think my government is up it’s own butt on this (and many other) issues.
Robo-tripping? Gah. Get some really fucking drugs, kids. They are cheap and plentiful. I would be too embarrassed to drink that shite to get high, and I’m an alcoholic & an addict! :rolleyes:
I wonder how long it wil be until the genus Ephedra is outlawed. Think ofwhat a great nation of gardeners we would become if the plants that most drugs are based on were not also outlawed.
So you can effectively drive a car without risking grievous bodily harm to yourself and other people on the road? Then why do they put those warnings on cold medicines about not operating heavy machinery?
Can you be charged with DUI for driving while on high on legal OTC drugs?
True and true. In my prime experimentation days, acid simply was not available in Southern California, period. Trust me, I looked.
Sudafed is not the problem. You and I both know that.
You don’t have to know any of the wrong people to get the other ingredients. They can all be procured with trips to a maximum of two or three different stores, with no hassle whatsoever.
DXM is a perfectly legitimate psychedelic. Keep in mind that it was synthesized specifically to mimic opiates, and turned out to be pretty much a psychedelic opiate, with the dissociative effects of the stronger opiates without some of the more characteristic effects associated with them. No “heroin itch”, for example, and none of that feeling of utter escape from the world’s problems that you get on heroin. It’s euphoric, but in a different way. While the opiate euphoria is like a relief, the DXM euphoria is more amphetamine-like or MDMA-like; more of a feeling of contented connectedness to the world around you. (And an assload of empathy toward animals. I normally try to avoid dogs, but the first time I tripped on DXM I fawned over my friend’s dog, showering her with attention and hugs. I’m sure I looked like an idiot, but hell, I loved that dog right then.)
PBR is at least cheaper than cough syrup.