From Cough Syrup to Contested Survival: Piramal Pharma’s Phensedyl and OTC Citizenship
From Cough Syrup to Contested Survival: Piramal Pharma’s Phensedyl and OTC Citizenship Posted on 30th November, 2025 (GMT 03:48 hrs) ABSTRACT This not-an-essay traces the cultural, political, and pharmaco-poetic life of Phensedyl—now manufactured by Piramal Pharma—and situates the codeine-laced syrup within a broader history of scarcity, surveillance, and self-medication in South Asia. Moving between memoir, literary analysis, public-health framing, and theoretical lenses drawn from Foucault, Derrida, and contemporary critiques of cannibal capitalism, the piece investigates how a seemingly mundane cough syrup becomes a portal into the infrastructures of regulation, desire, and dispossession. It examines how Phensedyl served, for many in the 1980s–90s, as a substitute for alcohol in restricted environments, how codeine’s codification reflects state power over pain, and how bodies transformed into sites of both rebellion and compliance. Through lyric passages, sociological ins...