Warning: This Post Involves Mucus

As I alluded to before, Emp. Peng. and I have colds. Had, really. We are at the stage where we are just getting rid of residual phlegm. The human body's capacity for snot production is quite astounding, and seems to take its sweet time ramping down once the virus is cleared out. As a result, the Rookery is awash in used tissues and the sound of two people trying not to cough up a lung. I believe in working with my cold, not against it. I will take expectorant like candy to help clear out the congestion, but I don't take cough suppressant if I can help it. I figure the cough is doing something, so better to let it get its work done. Cough suppressant just drags things out.

However, a couple of nights ago, the coughing kept us both up most of the night, so I broke down and went out for a bottle of Robitussin. Some time between my last cold and now, the stores made a new rule that you have to be 18 to buy cough syrup. At the checkstand, I casually asked when it was decided that kids don't get sick. Apparently, the ID rule was put in place because teenagers were buying up cough syrup to get drunk.

As a service to these teenagers, I am going to do the math here. The bottle of cough syrup I bought was on sale for $5 for 4 ounces and contained 1.4% alcohol. A little bit of multiplication shows that the cough syrup bottle contains .05 ounces of alcohol, or approximately 1/10 of a tablespoon. A standard "drink" (12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces wine, or 1.5 ounces hard liquor) contains 1.2 tablespoons of alcohol. In order to get the alcohol equivalent of one drink, you would need 12 bottles of cough syrup. At $5 a pop, that is a $60 beer. I am a lightweight in the alcohol tolerance department, but even I would require more than one beer to get intoxicated once you factor in the calories from 4 cups or so of corn syrup that comes with that 1.2 tablespoons of alcohol. Either this is another example of adult paranoia over the activities of the young folks, or teenagers have an excessive level of disposable income. I tend to lean toward the former explanation, since any teenager with the brains required to earn enough money to develop cough syrup alcoholism has enough brains to figure out at least one of the 6 or 8 more efficient and cost-effective ways of coddling their budding drinking problem.