Ingredients of Claritin-D:

240g psuedoephedrine sulfate (nasal decongestant)
10mg loratadine (antihistamine)

They should have a special “continuity nitpick of the week” section, where we can tell them what was most wrong with the show they like so much.

Long ago, pseudoephedrine was the active ingredient in Sudafed, which is where the drug gets its brand name. However, because of the possibility of pseudoephedrine to be converted into methamphetamines, the substance has been banned by the FDA. Nowadays, what is now called Sudafed contains phenylephrine, NOT pseudoephedrine.

So again. There is no pseudoephedrine in Claritin, nor is there any in Sudafed. In fact, no legal over-the-counter drug certified by the FDA contains pseudoephedrine.

I missed your earlier point about failing the cheerleaders. My assumption is that he was probably passing them when they didn’t deserve it rather than failing them unjustly. There’s something less ethically icky (in a gut reaction sense) about cutting them a break on their spanish grades all along, than the reverse, even if neither is acceptable by the standards of how teachers really should grade.

This reminds me of those “your brain on drugs” ads. I remember the egg, and thought it was alright. But a few years ago, there was a “sequel” ad, I guess you could call it, where Rachel Leigh Cook totally pulverizes a kitchen with a skillet, every blow representing something else that gets destroyed when you do drugs. I thought that was overkill. Like, excessive overkill. To the point where teens or young people without enough common sense to not take the risk would think, “Dude, that looks kind of awesome just to try,” or perhaps think that if something so “small” could have that much power over you, it’s worth trying at least once, just to see what it feels like, etc.

Another example: those gross anti-smoking ads done in claymation where kids lick dead animals and fish and stuff. I mean, yuck. I’d never smoke, but that choice has absolutely nothing to do with those ads and was made well before they came about, so I find them rather tiresome and annoying. And with the information available nowadays, IMO, if a person is going to smoke, those ads aren’t going to change their mind and make them not. They already know it’s dangerous and most likely going to result in cancer or something, so they know what they’re getting into when they begin the addiction in the first place. This relates to my theory on why I never took the TV episodes seriously: Jessie’s meltdown came after what, a few days of using the caffeine pills? I wasn’t around drugs when I was little, but I had enough common sense to recognize addiction relates to mental illness and that the scenarios represented like that were highly unlikely because those processes are usually much more gradual. Portrayals like the ones in that old HBO series “Lifestories: Families In Crisis” were more realistic because they showed how the person slowly slipped into the pool as opposed to cannonball-ing in like a Jessie.

Okay, totally rambled there. I guess I’m sort of dancing around the question of whether the sudden freak-out method is effective to normal people (because I do realize I’m rather… unique…). And I also wonder if maybe Glee is just thinking outside the box and trying to break stereotypes, this case being the generic Anti-Drug Episode for a series “aimed at teens.” For let’s not forget, this series is a “teen” drama, “teen” to be taken with an oversized grain of salt.

Glee, on the other hand, suggests that the pills are bad because cheating is bad. And what’s more, they show the two young, hot, talented leads simply deciding – without being told what to do by an authority figure – that they aren’t interested in drugs. The message is twofold:

1) Performance enhancers are bad because cheating is bad. And not even because it’s WRONG – which you could wriggle out of by saying something like “well, everyone else is doing it too, so I’m just leveling the playing field” – but just because it’s not enjoyable.

2) Young, hot, talented people do not like using drugs. Therefore, if you want to be young hot and talented, do not do drugs. (For more on this front and how it applies to things like fairy tales, see Bruno Bettleheim’s The Uses of Enchantment.)