A spoonful of sugar may make the medicine go down, but whatever they put in Children’s Dimetapp made me a 9-year-old junkie.

It seems unforgivably cruel that so many dangerously inedible products for children are made to smell like food items that children want very much to eat. Scratch & Sniff stickers (especially chocolate and gingerbread), scented magic markers (cherry and orange), and Play-doh (Ok, this wasn’t scented like a particular food, but it smelled DELICIOUS) … each daring curious youngsters to sneak a taste. The “non-toxic” labels on the packages seemed to be the manufacturers’ admission that kids were going to want to chow down.

But that was the soft stuff. If Play-doh was marijuana, grape Dimetapp was black tar heroin. One taste of that sweet, thin, vaguely-grape syrup, and the user just wanted more. And more. Of course, certain sodas like NuGrape functioned as methadone -- they weren’t nearly the same, true, but it was less harmful in mass quantities, and it usually tasted close enough to make the withdrawal pains go away.

As an adult-ish person, I like to think I’ve finally kicked the habit (one day at a time…), but every so often a weak day will find me on Google, investigating how much ‘Tapp I could guzzle without risking heart failure. Even talking about it is starting to make my hands shake. I don’t NEED a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, goddammit! I just need MORE OF THAT MOTHERFUCKING MEDICINE!!