Welcome to Am I Dying, a column that hopes to save you from your late-night WebMD spiraling. You can email us your hypochondriac questions at amidying@nymag.com.
Is Mucinex (or Claritin, or Sudafed) making me high? I swear every time I take an allergy or cold medication, I feel floaty and fuzzy-brained. And NyQuil definitely makes me hungover. What are the cold drugs doing to me??
Do kids these days still take Dayquil to get high before school? Is that a thing that ever really happened, or am I misremembering a horror story employed by D.A.R.E. as a scare tactic at my high school? Either way, the association is definitely there, and I tend to avoid daytime cold medicines for that very reason: the last thing I want when I have a cold is to feel sick and high. This is why I am a major advocate of the disgusting but effective Neti Pot.
Do not get me wrong: I am neither anti-chemical nor totally anti-drug. However! There is something so unpleasant about the cold-meds high — that weird circum-skull pressure and the faint buzzing behind your eyes. (Or … at least that’s what it’s like for me … ?) It doesn’t feel like it’s good for you, which of course, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t.
Lots of cold medications can, however, be overkill, says Albert Ahn, clinical instructor of internal medicine at NYU Langone Health. “A lot of these all-in-one medications — DayQuil, NyQuil, or Tylenol Cold and Flu formulations — they all have a bunch of stuff in them, and people usually don’t read the labels,” says Ahn.
