Asymmetrical Information

I think intoxication is a combination of physical effect and psychological mindset.

Hence, high school kids getting "so wasted, maaan" off of oregano, or having to deal with a hassle "killing" one's high.

If you're not in the mindset of getting intoxicated, the Robitussin will have less of an effect. If you are receptive to those effects, they'll be more pronounced.

A cousin of the placebo effect, perhaps. Narcotic drugs also affect us, with more or less power, depending on how we view them.

No, Dextromethorphan is definitely a psychotropic substance at the right dosages. About a full bottle for a somewhat narcotic effect, and more than that for a reality-altering psychedelic experience.

Coricidin can also have psychotropic effects, but is really nasty, toxic stuff at those dosage levels.

Check out http://www.third-plateau.org/faq/dxm_faq.shtml

Eric J is right. You need to slug down at least a whole bottle of 'Tussin to get the intended effect. It also helps if you haven't eaten in a while - like a day.

Look up Dextromethorphan on Wikipedia. I take for allergies a pill containing 15 mg every day, at bedtime because it makes me slightly sleepy.

Recreational use is about 200 mg, my guess that is two bottles of Robitussin at once. Lethal dose is 50-500mg/kg of weight. So imagine taking 1000mg, or twenty bottles.

The target of abuse is the anti-coughing active ingredient in these things, namely dextromethorphan. It's in the same structural series as the opiates, but it has an odd binding profile on several CNS receptor families, such as several of the serotonin and nicotinic receptors. It also hits the sigma-1 site, whose function people have been arguing about for years.

Taken in large doses, at least ten times the amount recommended for cough, the compound does seem to lead to various hallucinatory effects in some people. Others seem to feel horribly sick, and some lucky users apparently get both at once.

This has been a problem for years now - here's a literature citation from 1993.

Two CNS receptor-based comments on your blog in one day! Maybe I should write about economics?

Here's a decent, somewhat literate guide. Apparently it's only a powerful psychoactive if you drink a lot

It hasn't really been an increasing problem. Since the replacement of codeine with DXM, overdoses have remained fairly constant. From what I've read, the effect is real, but not very pleasant. It is achieved by taking 10-20 times the recommended dosage at a time.

Often, the drug is difficult to abuse because of the additives. You vomit before you can take too much. Lately, people have been extracting the DXM from the cough syrup and making it into pills. This will allow a clever and determined idiot to more easily harm him or her self, so it might become a problem.

One reason that you might not have noticed any "high" is that it is very much like being sick. You get all the joys of nausea, dizzyness, confusion and a fever - your cough, however, will go away.

Different people have different membrane characteristics. My family has trouble with gluten, nitrous oxide, nitrogen narcosis (different phenomena), and fluorides.

Awful stuff, one table spoon of it is all I can take. How many bottles does it take before you get a buzz on? Leah

Leah: one bottle. They also make pills and sell them in stores, which have the same active ingredients (and effect).

I first abused the stuff, in the long-gone Romilar, in 1968. It is difficult to find DXM by itself anymore, and anytime you consume enough blended medicine to get the effects you are getting a really nasty overdose of the other drugs. I'd rather throw up peyote and not get off, than throw up DXM and get off, as it invariably produces shoulder-wrenching dry heaves. Given the ready availability of the vastly safer psilocybin mushrooms these days, the main reason for people to experiment with DXM is prohibition induced lack of connections.

For a while, back in the Wild West days of the Internet, (1996-2000) there were a number of "Research Chemical" wholesalers who were selling pure USP DXM in powdered form. (In addition to quite a few other exotic compounds that weren't quite illegal.)

Given the ready availability of the vastly safer psilocybin mushrooms these days, the main reason for people to experiment with DXM is prohibition induced lack of connections.

I wish I knew how to find shrooms. They're not readily available to me, and I'm a student who runs with the kool kidz!

Abuse of cough medicine has been a staple of Houston, TX hip hop culture for years. It's called "Purple Drank" or "Lean" and influenced(along with Houston's heat and car culture) for the style of music popularized by DJ Screw, Paul Wall, Mike Jones, et al. in the same way that LSD influenced for psychadelic music.

DJ Screw died, btw, in 2000 from this, perhaps in conjunction with other substances.

I thought that Purple Drank was Codeine and Promethazine, not Dextromethorphan.

How is it that this comment thread has come this far without mention being made of the "Flaming Homer"?

Some time near the end of Brian Mulroney's tenure as Prime Minister of Canada, a book was published alleging that he made recreational use of Nyquil.

I like the stuff because it helps me sleep when I'm sick, but I figured that was because it was 40 proof (granted, I don't drink, so that probably helped).

My first drug experience was drinking a bottle of Robitussin DM at a New Years party in the 10th grade. As someone who had always shied away from taking the stuff for legitimate reasons, I had a hard time gulping it all down. But once it was in me, I felt it. The closest approximation to the feeling is smoking boat (marijuana laced with PCP). It's a foggy experience.

Subsequent to my first try, I bought a bottle of the generic version (Tussin), but it did nothing for me, and the awful taste convinced me that I was done Robotripping.

A whole thread on Robitussin, and nobody's mentioned Chris Rock? I'm shocked.

Just a note that I think other commenters have alluded to but not explicated: not every bottle of cough syrup is psychoactive. The "desired" chemical here is dextromethorphan - DXM. It's in Robitussin DM but not regular Robitussen.

Poor Man's PCP - Check out this piece that appeared in Harpers Magazine in 1993:

http://nepenthes.lycaeum.org/Drugs/DXM/poormanspcp.html

Excerpt:
"It was difficult to remember how to perform a money-for-merchandise transaction and even more difficult to put it into words, but I was eventually successful. I ate the hamburger slowly and deliberately. If I had become full before I finished the hamburger, I think I would have simply let it fall from my hands."

Another important point for anyone who reads libertarianish econ blogs for party hints: be very careful to take products that contain only DXM as the active ingredient if you decide to tuss up. Several common OTC drugs (in particular acetominophen) are highly toxic in the large doses you'd get from a full bottle.

Not that it's all that exciting-- all I've ever been able to get is a clearer-headed drunkenness. It's supposedly similar to ketamine in very large doses, but no way will you want to drink that much unless you're extraordinarily hard up. You're better off ordering salvia if you're looking to batter down those doors of perception in a safe and legal manner.

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