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 I took triple the recommended dose of Claritin (10mg + 10mg + 10 mg), which used to be a prescription drug until it was made over-the-counter in 2005. Claritin was once a hard drug, but now I guess it's been pussified. If the original Claritin was prescription-strength, then I guess now we're at Clarifive.  I chased the Claritwopointeight with half the bottle of Robitussin cough syrup. It was cherry flavored, if the cherry had been rotting inside the corpse of a goat for twelve weeks.  My face crushed itself into a violent pucker, which I was only able to loosen with the aid of needle-nosed pliers and an awl:  My nose started running immediately, though to be fair, maybe it was just trying to run away from the taste of the 'Tussin. If medicine was World War II German dictators, that shit would be Hitler. As luck would have it, I was planning to spend the day at Topsfield Fair in Topsfield, Massachusetts, which bills itself as "America's oldest county fair." Here's what happened.  I entered the fair with my head full of histamines and antihistimines, finding myself extremely speedy, mind-bogglingly jumpy. "Whazzat?" I screamed when a goat bleated behind me. "Whoozat?" "Whazzahizzle?" I shouted at a chicken, which squawked in fright. "Zazzy hoozlediddle?"  This picture says it all. I was drunk and crazy. The active ingredient in Robitussin is dextromethorphan, which according to Wikipedia causes "hallucinations," "out of body experiences," and "bizarre feelings of dissociation." How the hell do they sell this stuff on the shelves? "Robitushin ruules," I slurred, nearly stepping in a pile of pig feces. "Robilobe. Robilobindoodledookins." It was like Red Bull and vodka -- or perhaps Red Bull, vodka, and Jerry Garcia's urine. Everything was trippy and weird, which was a strange state of mind for the county fair, where everything is already trippy and weird. Did I really just see a man with an enormous goiter walk by? I thought to myself. And while we're at it, is that a 3,000-pound statue made out of butter?  I asked someone to snap a photo, so I could confirm reality later. My mouth was dry, but my nose was running and I was sneezing, probably from the goat dander. The Claritin wasn't doing shit for my allergies, while the Robitussin was grabbing reality by the quarks and kicking it in the gluons. What the hell is going on here? I asked myself as the fair melted into a thick soup of colors and smells. And why is that giant pickle holding a stuffed monkey? I have a rule: when you start hallucinating a giant pickle holding a monkey, it's time to put down the bottle of Robitussin and go home. It's a rule I've never had to use until now, but thank God I had it. I went home, and you can imagine my surprise when I looked through my photos AND FOUND THIS. I don't know how I got a picture of my hallucination. Maybe I spilled a little Robitussin on the camera. So Round 2 of the Drug Deathmatch produced a clear winner: Robitussin, which not only gave me a runny nose, but made me briefly imagine that my nose was running down the street, wearing a tiny sombrero. I'm hoping that Wyeth Consumer Healthcare will eventually change their label to read:  All this, and there was still one more round of the Drug Deathmatch to come. 
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