TikTok's Latest Bad Idea Is Turning Medicine Into Craft Ice
Editor's Note: Make sure to consult your doctor before freezing medicine.
TikTok is famous for being the birthplace of many less-than-brilliant trends and challenges, including the infamous Tide Pod challenge and milk crate challenge, where users record themselves taking part in risky behaviors in order to impress their followers. Similarly, a slew of dangerous challenges involving cold and flu medications have hit many users' For You pages. This includes the Benadryl challenge from 2020, where users consumed an unsafe amount of the medication to induce hallucinations (per The Monitor). While this may seem shocking on its own, another one of the worst food trends we've ever seen involves freezing over-the-counter medications into craft ice. This particular trend hit TikTok in early 2023.
TikTok user @jaystylex, known on the app as "the CEO of ice," gained notoriety for a video depicting NyQuil that has been frozen into light green ice cubes. The process of creating the NyQuil ice isn't explicitly shown in the video. But, in order to create the cubes, they likely utilized an ice maker, which is featured in their other videos to create ice from other household items and foods, such as eggs and cake batter.
Freezing medication can have some unintended consequences
While ingesting ice cubes made of NyQuil definitely isn't the intended use for the medication, some doctors say that freezing medications can have dangerous consequences for consumers. All medicines have specific storage instructions, which can be discussed with your physician or pharmacist before using the medication. Per Medecins Sans Frontieres, storage instructions for medicine are designed with a medication's chemical properties in mind in order to keep the drug stable and safe to use long-term.
Liquid medications like NyQuil are especially sensitive to freezing, according to the Fort Worth Report. Once frozen, the integrity of certain medications may be damaged, making them less effective when they need to be used. This can also make it hard for people to know what an appropriate dose of frozen medication would be, thus increasing the risk of potential side effects and overdoses.
@jaystylex Trying Nyquill Ice #icetok
@Jaystylex has yet to comment on the risks involved with consuming frozen NyQuil ice but has taken to TikTok to create a subsequent video freezing Pepto Bismol. "The lady at the store was concerned why I was buying 32 ounces of Pepto Bismol," they can be heard commenting while pouring bright pink liquid into the unsuspecting ice maker. Another user commented that the ice maker will "forever have the faintest taste of Pepto," which hopefully is the only unfortunate consequence of this trend.