Talk:Paregoric

Untitled
Just wanted to know if perigoric had any mental effects on adults whose parents used it frequently on them. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.226.98.231 (talk) 20:54, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
 * unless you were spoonfed a liter a day, that big mac or the air you are the breathing has done more damage --LieutenantColonel Frank Slade 07:35, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

I too am looking for information about the long term effects of paregoric on the children who were given it. My infant uncle died of a paregoric overdose given him by his hired caregiver. So death was a very possible worst case scenario. Narcotic addiction and developmental damage would seem assured with regular abuse of this in infants. I would like to find information about this too. --  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.187.207.76 (talk) 00:38, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

--- comparing the effects of an adult eating one big mac to a baby being addicted to opium is ludicrous. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.187.207.76 (talk) 14:32, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Personal account moved from the Paregoric page
My memories of Paregoric are from the late fifties and earlier sixites when mothers would use this to ease the pain of teething babies. They would dab it on their fingers and rub it on the gums of the baby. The liquid was deep amber and smelled pleasantly of alcohol, camphor and oil of anise. It could be purchased from the druggist by adults. A bottle would last a long time. Some adults on the fringe would buy it for the intoxicating effects and consume the whole bottle in a sitting. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kpjas (talk • contribs) 07:19, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Paregoric
When was paregoric taken off the counter? I knew several older/younger women who more or less lived on it.

Lrkneupper 15:44, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Paregoric is mentioned in the book Rocket Boys. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.202.49.116 (talk) 06:06, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Paregoric....hahaha
Paregoric was sort of a running joke on the DEA when it was OTC because it is...well..opium. Anyways, the important part, As far as I know it is now unavailiable and most likely no longer manufactured. I work in a pharmacy (in the US), we have not been able to order it from any of our suppliers for a couple years. Can anyone confirm this?Somn — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.172.0.150 (talk) 12:48, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Even though nearly all pharmacies have no more Paregoric in stock and cannot order it, it is even so possible to obtain it from a compounding pharmacy by prescription. The prescription cannot be refilled and a new one has to be written and given or mailed to the companding lab each time. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Charles brough (talk • contribs) 19:29, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Dates
Yeah, I would change the dates listed in the article, and absolutely mention that, even in the 1950s and 1960s, it was used to ease the pain of teething. Acter. Acter (talk) 11:11, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

There Are Numerous Inaccuracies in This Article ...
And I'm not sure that I have time to correct them right now.

Some key points:

-- Paregoric has not been discontinued as a prescription drug in the United States. The article cited has been misconstrued. The FDA's meaning was simply that the Company to whom the letter was addressed had not filed the proper paperwork with the FDA. If you don't believe this, you can go to a site to check current prices for the drug. For example, go to floridadiscountdrugcard.com, and look up the price for Paregoric. You'll find it. The site does not list pricing for drugs that are no longer on the market. I've checked many times.

-- This article fails to address the drugs Donnagel-PG and Parepectolin. These were drugs that combined Paregoric with Kaolin and Pectin, among other substances. They were available without prescription in many states until the early 1990's! They were discontinued in an apparent campaign -- presumably by the FDA -- to reduce sales of OTC Exempt Narcotics. I believe that a law or rule was passed stating that the mixture of Kaolin and Pectin was ineffective for management of diarrhea. If you go to a store and buy a bottle of an anti-diarrheal drug such as Kaopectate, you will find that the Kaolin and Pactin has generally been replaced with atapulgite.

At about the same time, it seems that the drug Terpin Hydrate was removed from market. The vast majority of OTC sales of cough preparations were for Terpin Hydrate and Codeine Elixir. Sales of Exempt Narcotics containing codeine are still allowed in some states, like New Jersey (which should be removed from the list of states prohibiting sales of OTC Exempt Narcotics). One example is Robitussin AC.

-- The article refers to state laws which may limit or limited the number and quantity of Exempt Narcotic Sales. But it fails to mention the more basic federal restrictions which apply / applied to sales in ALL states. Federal laws prohibit sale of more than 4 ounces of codeine containing cough syrup per 48 hour period. No more that 6 ounces of Donnagel-PG could be sold OTC, and no more than 8 ounces of Parepection (which contained a lower amount of Paregoric per ounce) could legally be sold within a 48 hour period. Federal law requires purchasers to sign a log book when purchasing any Exempt Narcotic. Pharmacists are also supposed to ask for identification if the buyer is not known to him/her. However, during the era that Donnagel-PG and Parepectolin were available, ID was very rarely asked for. This is from first hand experience.

Even though codeine-containing preparations are still available in some states without prescriptions, the vast majority of pharmacies will sell them only to customers they know well -- or, even more frequently, won't sell them at all. Many go so far as to actually lie to you and state that they're prescription only items.

There is a good deal more, but I don't have time now, and should provide some sources.

Factstruthandtheinternet (talk) 15:17, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Once again, I removed the reference that someone had placed here regarding the FDA's sending a letter to a pharma company manufacturing it, stating that it was a "new, unapproved" drug. This letter has been consistently misinterpreted. "New" and "Unapproved" in the cited letter referred to the fact that the specific pharmaceutical company that the letter was addressed to had not completed the appropriate paperwork with the FDA to legally manufacture the drug. There were many pharmaceutical companies that manufactured the drug in the past in compliance with FDA requirements. Also, while there may have been a shortage of paregoric for a period of time, the drug itself was never withdrawn from the U.S. market. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.110.253.75 (talk) 08:42, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Trivial, passing mentions in popular culture
I have removed the following list from the article because it is just a random collection of trivia. None of this information seems particularly relevant to the article, and is rather just a collection of passing mentions of Paregoric that don't contribute anything notable to the article. If someone feels otherwise and would like to summarize key aspects of list and write some coherent prose about it, that could make a useful contribution to the article. But with this low-content list of trivia being so long compared to the rest of the article, it just detracts from the quality of the article. -- Ed (Edgar181) 11:56, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * William Cowper Brann's "Brann the Iconoclast" (1898)
 * Many works by William S. Burroughs, including The Yage Letters, Junkie, Queer and Naked Lunch
 * William S. Burroughs, Jr.'s Speed
 * Robin Cook's Harmful Intent (1990)
 * Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Three Gables
 * Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
 * James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan
 * William Golding's Rites of Passage (laudanum is also mentioned in the book)
 * Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" (1851)
 * Paul Metcalf's "Araminta and the Coyotes" (1991)
 * Rick Moody's novel The Ice Storm
 * John Steinbeck's East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath (mentioned as "soothin' syrup" in "The Grapes Of Wrath")
 * Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day
 * Kōbō Abe's The Box Man
 * The "anonymous" work Go Ask Alice
 * Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion
 * Anton Myrer's Once an Eagle
 * William Faulkner's "Pylon"
 * Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved
 * Caleb Carr's The Angel of Darkness
 * George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and A Clergyman's Daughter
 * Joseph Conrad's novella The Nigger of the Narcissus
 * John Fowles' "The Magus"
 * Mark Twain's Letters From the Earth
 * Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad
 * Alexandra Ripley's "Scarlett"
 * Woody Guthrie's "Bound For Glory" and "The Ballad Of Tom Joad"
 * Homer H. Hickam, Jr.'s "Rocket Boys"
 * Catherine Cookson's "Fanny McBride"
 * Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone
 * Tennessee Williams's one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946) (as the medicine Flora drinks to relax herself.)
 * Night Nurse
 * I'll Never Heil Again (mentioned as the name of a fictional place)
 * The Ice Storm
 * Little House on the Prairie, in the episodes "A Matter of Faith" and "To Live with Fear"
 * M*A*S*H, in the episodes "The Yalu Brick Road" and briefly in "Sticky Wicket"
 * Street Scene an opera by Kurt Weill: In Act One, Scene One, the characters talk about giving it to a teething baby.
 * Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
 * The_Odd_Couple_(TV_series) Season 2 Episode 13 "Felix the Calypso Singer"
 * Jim Carroll Basketball Diaries as well as mentions in his poetry including a poem entitled Paregoric Babies


 * Actually, as a non-druggie who has never heard of this stuff, this booklist looks the most interesting part of the article. Most informative.


 * Claverhouse (talk) 20:02, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Re: dextromethorpan
>>In the 21st century its two main uses have been largely supplanted by minimally psychoactive cough-suppressant drugs (such as dextromethorphan)<< Interesting to refer to dextromethorphan as "minimally psychoactive." Perhaps "minimally psychoactive at the prescribed dose" would be more accurate, as there are known abusers of this substance known for its own and quite potent psychoactive properties at elevated doses. Marty55 (talk) 22:08, 7 November 2021 (UTC)