NyQuil Is In The News!

 

My NyQuil Challenge

(Getting Paid for a Story I Wrote About It)

It’s one of the most famous advertising slogans ever: “The nighttime sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, so you can rest medicine.”

Nowhere in that string of adjectives is “chicken frying.”

But that didn’t stop a few folk with too much time on their hands from creating the TikTok NyQuil Challenge. At least it gave local TV stations something to fill their newscasts: Warning, do not fry chicken in NyQuil.

If you think that was a stupid idea, that no one would actually try, then you don’t remember a few years ago when Dawn mailed out free samples of lemon dishwashing detergent, only to have to issue a warning not to use it as cooking oil.

Years ago I wrote a story about the alcohol content of NyQuil for Icon magazine.

When I told my wife, she didn’t ask about the alcohol content. She wanted to know: What is Icon magazine?

Same thing I wondered when the Icon editor called me back in 1998 to talk about the assignment. But I thought that might sabotage the deal so I didn’t ask what Icon was. .

I asked what angle they wanted me to pursue, how many words and the deadline.

And in the back of my head I kept wondering the most important question – and not what is Icon – how much does it pay?

At the time my agent told me that I should get a dollar a word for magazine articles. She didn’t represent me, or any of her clients, to magazines. Literary agents once did, back in the golden age of magazines, when there were scores of well-paying magazines who kept F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway afloat between novels.

By the nineties it wasn’t worth an agent’s time to send out multiple submissions to a group of magazines and wait to hear back.

Ten percent of, say, $2,000 is only $200. And that wouldn’t pay one day’s rent on a Manhattan office.

The Icon editor explained it was a short piece for the front of the magazine, 500 words, with a due date in a couple of months. She also told me it would pay $500.

That was good enough for me: $500 for 500 words, a dollar a word.

I did have one more question – in addition to what is Icon – but I didn’t ask it.

I wanted – needed – to know if Icon paid on acceptance or on publication. I learned a long, long time ago in journalism school at UT that you don’t want to write for magazines that pay on publication. Because that can be months. Or years. Or never.

I had experiences, bad experiences, with the later. And even the former can be dicey.

The first magazine piece I ever sold was in 1973. I had sent a story idea to Saturday Review, then a popular literary magazine: it was about the 130-game - and counting - losing streak of the high school basketball team at Friendsville Academy. I had forgotten about the query letter when the phone rang one night. It was Richard Levine who said he was an editor at Saturday Review. They wanted my story. 2,000 words. By March 15. And then he said, and I’ll never forget, “We can only pay $250. I know it’s not much but it’s a good way to break into the magazine.”

That’s okay, I assured him, all the while thinking in the back of my head: I pay $90 a month rent, I have a roommate, that should last me six months!

That was the good part of the experience.

The magazine was published in April with my story up front. I bought every copy in Knoxville, which was ten.

And then I read the bad news in the newspaper: Saturday Review had filed for bankruptcy. I would not be getting my $250. At least not any time soon.

I learned a lot about bankruptcy court that year. I was an unsecured creditor. I was last in line.

A year or so later I got a check for $25 and change. I have it framed as a reminder of the perils of being a free-lance writer.

To make a short Icon story short, I wrote the story about NyQuil, they published it, I waited, and waited, and waited.

Two months after the story was published, I called my editor.

She was shocked that I hadn’t been paid.

At least she said she was shocked.

She also said she would check on it and get back to me.

Neither thing ever happened. She never got back to me (or returned any future phone calls). And I never got paid.

I’m not much of a bill collector but I did give it a try. I talked to a junior editor who was also shocked and actually transferred me to accounting, where the people were also shocked.

And ever since then I have called it my Shocking NyQuil story.

And Icon? I never did figure out what it was about. And apparently neither did the editors. It went out of business shortly after publishing my $500 story. But before sending me that check.

 

By the time it ran in the magazine it had gone back and forth between the editor and me and had swollen to 695 words. So technically they owed me $695. If they don’t pay you, I guess it doesn’t matter how much they owe you.  

Here’s my NyQuil story that Icon magazine published in April 1999:

 

In Troy, Michigan a 19-year-old man who was stopped by police after they noticed his car weaving, at first claimed he had downed five or six shots of NyQuil to fight off the flu. He later admitted he had consumed the entire bottle. His blood alcohol level registered 0.04, twice Michigan's legal limit for teens. He's now facing a ninety-day sentence and a hundred dollar fine.

What? You don't think people really drink the stuff for the alcohol? Think again. Maybe they don't talk about it in those terms - unless the police stop them - but why do you think model Cindy Crawford packs NyQuil in her overnight bag? It helps her sleep on airplanes. That's why David Letterman could use it as kicker to a Top Ten "Good Things About Having the Flu" List: "Number one, getting gooned on NyQuil!" And in 1995 NBA basketball player Roy Tarpley didn't hesitate to claim, with a straight face, that his breathalyzer results were the result of the green bottle, this despite the fact that he had been booted out of the league once already for drinking.

The International Olympic Committee doesn't worry about the alcohol content. It bans NyQuil for the same reason that Orange County, California tried to limit purchasers to one bottle a day in July 1998: NyQuil contains ephedrine, a stimulant the IOC claims can enhance an athlete's performance and Orange County claims is used by drug dealers in the manufacture of methamphetamine. But don't worry, normal NyQuil users. It's not going to cause you to dig out your old gym clothes. Only a large dose of ephedrine would mimic adrenaline by increasing the heart rate and blood pressure. In fact Cornell University Medical College professors Gary Wadler and Brian Hainline, authors of "Drugs and the Athlete," say banning Nyqul for athletes, is senseless regardless of the dose.

That's a lot of controversy for a little green bottle. But NyQuil has been making noise since it first started jumping off pharmacy shelves thirty years ago.

It owes part of that early success to a great name. NyQuil just whispers "nighttime tranquility." And also to some great commercials - for years Nathan Lane lent his voice to the ads. Great name, great commercials. Plus it knocked you on your ass. Kentucky pharmacist Alan Simon says the original formula was 40 percent alcohol. "In dry counties [counties which don't allow the sale of alcoholic beverages] it was the best-selling item in the drug store." Dry counties aren't a thing of the past. In Kentucky, oddly enough, Bourbon County is dry. But there are more automobiles today, making it easier, and cheaper, to drive to the next county and buy some alcohol that doesn't taste like medicine.   

The NyQuil story is pretty impressive considering that Nyquil almost didn't make it out of the laboratory three decades ago. It began life as a triumph of marketing over science. A Vicks company researcher had formulated a new liquid remedy that cleared up scratchy throats and dried up running eyes. The problem was, it put you to sleep. A crafty marketing person, whose name has been lost, saw the potential: It relieves cough symptoms but it puts you to sleeps. Hmmm. Let's sell it as a nighttime cold remedy!

It immediately became the most successful product in Vick's history. And remember, these are the people who invented Vapo-Rub, not exactly chopped liver in the cough remedy category. One reason it put people to sleep was its alcohol content. The original product was 80 proof, right up there with vodka and gin. As recently as five years ago NyQuil was fifty proof (25 percent alcohol). You could drink three glasses of wine or one glass of NyQuil. Plus it unstuffed your head.

That's when the NyQuil folks, yielding to pressure from the industry's Non-Prescription Drug Association and also from parents who weren't thrilled about little Johnny getting drunk on his cough syrup, cut the alcohol level. Today it's only, oh, 17 percent alcohol.

All this from an innocuous-looking green liquid. Of course it's not really green either. That's the FD&C Yellow No. 10 and the FD&C Blue No. 1 at work.

 

 

There have been at least two other magazines that used the name Icon.