It’s a long time since I took a powerful drug that wasn’t dispensed by a pharmacist. Last winter, during what has become the annual post-Christmas Covid collapse, I searched in vain for the codeine cough linctus I’d been prescribed when the virus first struck four years ago.
Why must we suffer because a few scrotes misuse it?
‘Keep it on the bedside table,’ said my GP at the time, ‘and when you wake up coughing in the night, take a swig and you’ll be able to go back to sleep.’ She was right: it provided blissful relief and precious, life-enhancing sleep. But when I asked my current GP (we’ve since moved out of London), she gazed into the middle distance and made gnomic pronouncements of the ilk, ‘We don’t really do that any more’.
Eventually, in the fifth or sixth high street chemist I tried, a pharmacist sized me up at length and, finding, on balance, that I was a respectable, if struggling, mother-of-three and not a nascent opioid addict, directed me – sotto voce – to the children’s pholcodine linctus. I had to swig a bit more, but it worked: it stopped the coughing and let me sleep, enabled me to function and carry out my parental responsibilities and keep up with work.
Now I am kicking myself for not buying up that shop’s entire stock. Before half-term, we all went down with flu (remember flu? Covid’s less attention-seeking and no less unpleasant predecessor). Over breakfast, our relentless hacking coughs vied with a Radio 4 news report announcing a ban on cough syrups containing codeine. ‘Try having warm drinks with honey and lemon and throat sweets’ was the advice from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.
‘Fuck honey and lemon!’ I exclaimed. ‘I want codeine and I want it NOW.’ Why must we suffer because a few scrotes misuse it? (The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority says it is used in a recreational drink known as ‘Purple Drank’ – which sounds like something the comedian Chris Morris asked a dealer for in the Brass Eye drugs special of 1997, along with ‘Clarky Cat’ and ‘Triple Sod’.)
Other cold and flu meds no longer contain therapeutic doses of ephedrine: now it’s either drastically reduced of replaced with pseudo-ephedrine – because ephedrine can be used to manufacture meth. It is all part of what feels like a wider process of infantilisation, removing useful, efficacious medicines out of the reach of sensible, right-thinking people under the guise of safety, or rising addiction. But it’s been going on for longer than there’ve been concerns about opiate addiction.
I think the rot about prescribing effective painkillers may started post-Shipman. Before giving birth to my first child ten years ago, I asked the anaesthetist about post-operative pain relief.
‘Er, well we’ll offer you paracetamol or ibuprofen,’ he said, not meeting my eye. ‘Seriously?’ I asked. ‘That’s what I take for period pain. You’re about to saw me in half.’ Back on the post-natal ward I remember screaming in the middle of the night for Oramorph (oral morphine), in unimaginable pain. I had Oramorph written into both subsequent birth plans – yet still had to fight for it.
Morphine and codeine are lousy highs that have made me woozy and vomit on the couple of occasions I’ve inadvertently taken too much (the former administered by a nurse after a riding accident, the latter for sciatic pain from a slipped disc when I misjudged the dose – not fun and not something I’ll do again). Most people can judge what’s an appropriate dose.
No one would advocate a return to bygone medicine chests bursting with laudanum and tonic wines laced with cocaine. In his memoir, A Sort of Life, Graham Greene recalled draining a bottle of hay fever drops as a depressed adolescent, ‘which, as they contained a small amount of cocaine, were probably good for my despair’. As Paul McGann exclaims in Withnail and I, ‘Not even the wankers on the building site would drink that.’ Yet desperate people will and do: when I lived in Brixton, you couldn’t buy Phenergan (an anti-histamine with a mild sedative effect) in the branch of Boots by the Tube station, only in pharmacies towards leafier Herne Hill and Dulwich.
But banning everything which, when misused, gives the tiniest bit of a buzz, consigns the majority to feeble, homeopathic doses – like the useless, sugary cough syrup that has failed to soothe my suffering children.
And MHRA guidance isn’t followed uniformly. When I struggled to breastfeed my first child, mad midwives urged me to knock back the maximum dose of Motilium (domperidone – commonly taken to relieve bloating and wind) to increase my milk supply. It had no conceivable effect; I put my baby on a bottle and didn’t look back.
Domperidone has since been banned because of its links to heart attacks – but as Mary Wakefield reported last month, it can be accessed by trans women who want to experience breast feeding. I’m too tired and drained to be drawn into gender wars: as another disrupted night beckons, I can only think of another line from Withnail. But it’s not the finest wines available to humanity I want, it’s codeine cough linctus. We want it here and we want it now.
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