Cough Medicine Scare

Type DXM into Google or You Tube and you will quickly learn what your teenager probably already knows—cough medicine can take a person on euphoric, psychedelic, or dissociative trips without even breaking the law.

Yes, teenagers know how to get high off of cough medicine. Online they can even find DXM calculators that tell them how much of what brands of cough medicine they can use to get to the four different “plateaus.”

But DXM and cough medicine abuse is a dangerous game that can unexpectedly become fatal.

In 2003, when Misty Fetko, an emergency room nurse and devoted mother of two, discovered her son’s drug abuse it was too late. She found him dead in his bedroom after a lethal mix of drugs including a prescription narcotic, marijuana, and dextromethorphan (DXM), the active ingredient in many over-the-counter cough medicines.

Misty says, “As a registered nurse and an involved mother, I knew I needed to be on the lookout for signs of drug abuse. I can recall once seeing two empty bottles of cough syrup following a sleepover with Carl’s friends.

Unsure of whether or not this was something I should be concerned by, I got on the Internet and did some research. Unfortunately, I never found anything to suggest that there was any danger in what I had discovered.”

Now, six years later, Misty is still working passionately to help educate parents about the dangers of DXM—and she is using the internet to help do it!

Misty is the most recent member of Five Moms, a program created by the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) to help spread the word to other mothers about the very real dangers of cough medicine abuse. 

In addition to creating the Five Moms website, the CHPA has developed another excellent resource for parents called www.stopmedicineabuse.org. On these sites, you can find life saving information about OTC drug abuse and how talk to our kids about it.

I recently attended meetings on Capitol Hill with the CHPA and Five Moms to support legislation to prohibit OTC cough medicine sales to minors and to restrict sales of raw dextromethorphan to only legitimate entities registered with FDA or relevant state agencies. Hopefully, one day the law will help limit the availability of DXM.

But, as parents, we can’t wait. We need to talk to our kids now. We need to keep open the lines of communication so that our children have a safe place to talk about their questions, problems and curiosities.