I do BC and Goody powders all the times. Means I don’t have to chew my aspirin/tylenol/whatever.
They’re generally only available in the South. I brought some back when my daughter was young because she sometimes needed aspirin but couldn’t take pills.
That’d be Disprin then, wouldn’t it? And even that’s usually in a tablet form (not entirely unlike Berocca), IIRC.
Coming up next on the Straight Dope: “Could you pick me up a bag of homo, eh?”
Never heard of it as an aspirin. I’d only heard of powders from Godfather I where it refers to illicit drugs.
They sell them in the vending machines where I work.
To “take a powder” is an old idiom meaning to leave, or also to die. A quick Google shows early usage in the 1930s but I’m guessing it predates that to a time when medicine wasn’t mass manufactured in pill form.
Since the term was associated with death it is reasonable to assume that often the powders were something stronger than aspirin.
No. After reading the thread I did remember the time when my great aunt, who was visiting from out of town had someone take her to all the local stores trying to find BC powder. I didn’t know what it was, and didn’t ask.
Is that the same thing as in all those British mystery novels where people take sachets of headache powders? And usually someone fills the sachet with poison or something. Anyway, I always assumed it was like Alka-Seltzer, only powdered, and you’d put it in a drink and take it. Have never seen it IRL, until recently when my husband brought home some Bayer’s aspirin in little packets–you open it up and pour it in your mouth like a Pixy Stick. Works great.
I should ask around in Toronto. I’m curious whether the stuff is available in Canada.
But I prefer 2% to homo. 
I would assume meth or coke as well.
Disprin is just a brand name of aspirin (and usually comes in pill form - are you thinking of Aspro-Clear, another brand which also comes in pill form but dissolves in water?).
Aspirin can also come in powder form, sold in little packets.
For you non-USians, we’re not talking about Aspirin the brand name drug, we’re talking about acetylsalicylic acid (ASA). Aspirin’s a generic name here.
And I guess I have to say yes, since I’ve seen them, but, in context, I probably wouldn’t have known what she was talking about. I would not think you would refer to something being near the aspirin if it was itself aspirin.
Oh, and here’s a picture of it in use. You can see why the kid thought it was drugs.
We have powders in the Midwest, too, though they’re certainly not as popular as in the south. AFAIK, Walmart carries BC and Goody nationwide, and they’re now marketed by GlaxoSmithKline, rather than the smaller firms that used to sell them.
Bayer recently began marketing Bayer Aspirin and Alka-Seltzer Plus cold medicine in powder form, though they are trying to market them as something new and modern: “Quick Release Crystals.”
Goody powders came to mind when I looked at the title of this thread.
I’d never heard of “powders” until I moved down here to NC.
This damn Yankee had never heard of them either.
In the UK you can get them made by Beechams that have a decongestant (I think) and possibly caffeine as well as the aspirin, for cold/flu relief. I’ve never seen them purely as aspirin though.
I answered No, because if someone asked me to “go pick me up some of my powders” I wouldn’t have known WTF they meant. But I have, vaguely, heard of headache powders, as something that was old-fashioned and/or Southern. (And thought, “Powdered aspirin that you drink? Ewww, wouldn’t that taste nasty?”)
Yup. I keep a box of BC Powder in my desk. They’re fantastic when I feel a migraine coming on. And I take them straight: no liquid chaser.
It’s generic here in the U.S. as well. Never heard of Aspirin as a brand name, though it might have been 150 years or so ago when it was first produced.