Cold and/or Flu season is once again upon my household. A few weeks ago, Mrs. Tracer came doen with a nasty bug, and I dutifully sauntered off to the local Rite-Aid [TM] to obtain some throat relief for her.
My favorite branc of throat lozenges has always been regular-strength Sucrets. Gool ol’ hexylresorcinol-based sucker-pops. They don’t pack the anesthetic whallop of the diclonine-based Maximum Strength Sucrets, but sometimes you don’t WANT to be numb, you just want a little bit of soothage.
Sadly, though, Maximum Strength Sucrets are now the ONLY variety to be found.
Worse, I can’t seem to find ANY throat lozenges based around hexylresorcinol anymore. It’s all “menthol” this and “chloraseptic” that and “diclonine” the other.
So … what happened? Did people just lose interest in hexylresorcinol? Did SmithKline Beecham (the makers of Sucrets) suffer a marketing blunder by calling their original formula “regular strength” in a maximum-strength world? Was hexylresorcinol declared Anathema by the Catholic Chur–er, I mean, the FDA?
Market forces? Maybe more folks out there DO want to be numb than want to be merely soothed?
They still sell hexylresorcinol-based lozenges in the UK. Check out “TCP sore throat lozenges”, for all the good it does Mrs. Tracer…
It’s also possible the FDA pulled the plug on hexylresorcinol for some obscure reason, but my google fu is unable to turn anything up. Not everything’s on the Internet, though. But apparently it’s popular with the shrimp diseases crowd. Who knew?
I worked for a few months at a plant that produces generic drugs, including hexylresorcinol cough drops. Scuttlebutt was that no one wanted to handle the raw ingredient. It would leave a powdery residue on clothes and gear that would eventually come off, get on your skin and in your eyes, and cause terrible burning irritation. It wouldn’t surprise me if some agencies banned the stuff. That said, it appears to still be legal to use in cough drops in Canada, though I’ve been noticing it less and less. Ever since that job, I read pharmaceutical labels carefully.
