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given day is 300 milligrams. More than that can trigger ringing in the ears, dilated pupils, flushing, fever, hallucinations, and seizure. The bright, friendly shade of pink associated with the brand belies its powerful effects. If you’ve taken one, you should not be driving. Diphenhydramine, after all, is not just the active ingredient in Benadryl. Known for inducing drowsiness, it is the active ingredient in sleeping aids like Nytol, Unisom gels, and Tylenol PM.
    Imagine a depressed housewife who is trying to shut out the siren call of sleeping pills. Now imagine she finds sleeping pills tucked in every pocket, every corner of the house, and even the penny dish by the front door. Imagine her husband reminding her before she leaves for the library or the movies or the grocerystore: “Hey, do you have your sleeping pills with you? Do you need extra? Maybe you should pack a few extra.”
    Sometimes my friends would joke that if we ever decided to kill ourselves, I had the tastiest options by far. “Death by chocolate!” they exclaimed. “Death by ice cream!” It certainly would be easy. I can walk into any typical kitchen and find at least fifteen things that would kill me if I ate them, and that’s without even looking under the sink for the drain cleaner.
    Yet to anyone who has ever had a severe allergic reaction—the numb lips, the swollen throat, the frantic swallowing for air, the churning cramps—the idea that you would volunteer for that sensation is idiotic. Forget the allure of something sugary. No one wants to be drowning in their own spit as they die.
    Benadryl was different. I knew what it tasted like (nothing at all), how easily one went down, how quickly another four or five could go down, how it made my eyelids sweetly heavy within a half hour. To an anxious and sleep-starved teenager attending a high-pressure high school, that didn’t sound like such a bad way to go. At times that sounded like heaven.
    One night I was hiding out in my room, moping and listening to Nirvana’s
MTV Unplugged
. My parents were fighting. A boy I liked didn’t like me back. I had a ten-page paper due the next day that I had not even started. I emptied my purse, rooted through my underwear drawer, reached into the sliding cubby of my headboard, unpeeled each individual blister casing, and lined up every capsule I had: fourteen Benadryl, and I hadn’t even raided the upstairs. I looked at them for a long time. Then I burst into tears, hit the stop button on my boom box, and walked out to the living room. My mother, inured to theteenage temperament at this point, didn’t ask questions. We sat on the couch together and watched the eleven o’clock news.
    I used to wonder if I was the only one tempted to overdose. As I grew older and began meeting other people with allergies, we would crack wise on our membership in the cult of Benadryl carriers. There is no diplomatic way of asking, “So, did you ever think about taking a whole handful at once?”
    Only as the world has become Googlable do I find them out there: The high school basketball player who died with a mixture of Benadryl and rubbing alcohol in his stomach. A paper on “pediatric intravenous catheter abuse,” published after a child with long-term illness drained the powder from Benadryl capsules into her IV. And I wonder how many other kids, afraid they will always be at odds with the rest of the world, take a Benadryl or maybe two or maybe three—only to have nothing worse come of it than cotton mouth and a hellishly difficult time getting up for school the next morning.
    That night, my mom went to bed after the news, but I stayed up to watch the
Tonight Show
. After the
Tonight Show
I watched the
Late Show
. Then the even later show. Then an infomercial starring Cher. Finally the station showed the American flag waving, while playing a prerecorded version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,”