How I inadvertently roofied my son

The weekend before last, I came home from walking the dog at about noon to find Caroline asleep in bed. This was surprising for three reasons. She’d been up and about when I left the house. She’s not one for taking naps. And her mother was coming to lunch. “Are you all right?” I asked, prodding her awake. “No,” she said. “I felt a headache coming on, took some Nurofen and suddenly started feeling incredibly dizzy. So I decided to lie down for a few minutes and then fell asleep.”

I wasn’t too worried because she does occasionally suffer from dizziness, usually accompanied by a migraine. So I made lunch while her mother went to a chemist and bought Caroline some travel sickness pills that she thought would help. They didn’t, but I did some googling and discovered that a large portion of McDonald’s fries accompanied by a 16oz beaker of Coca-Cola is a good migraine cure, thanks to the high doses of salt and caffeine. That was a step too far for Caroline, so I bought her a large packet of ready salted crisps and made her a strong cup of coffee. They did make her feel slightly better and the following day she was up and about again.

Fast forward to this Saturday, and almost exactly the same thing happened, only this time the patient was my 17-year-old son Freddie. I returned from a dog-walk to find him crashed out on the garden furniture. I woke him to ask if he was OK and he said he’d suddenly come over with an urge to lie down and now felt a bit delirious. When he got up, he said the ground beneath his feet felt as if it was rolling, like the deck of a ship. What was going on? Had Caroline been suffering from some weird, vertiginous virus that she’d passed on to our son?

“I came back from the gym and my back was hurting so Mum gave me a couple of Nurofen,” he said. “Do you think I could be allergic?”

The penny began to drop. I went upstairs to the bathroom and found the bottle of Nurofen by the sink. Sure enough, it was the one I keep beside my bed, but instead of painkillers, I’d been using it to store some loose sleeping pills. Caroline had found the bottle the week before and taken what she thought were two Nurofen, when in fact they were two 10mg tablets of zopiclone. No wonder she’d fallen asleep. She’d then repeated the same mistake when Freddie had complained of back pain.

“How could you be such an idiot?” I asked her. “You’ve roofied our son.” “What?” she said. “How was I supposed to know you’d replaced the Nurofen with sleeping pills? This is entirely your fault.” “My fault? They look absolutely nothing like Nurofen. Nurofen are sugar-coated, like Smarties, and they’ve got the word ‘Nurofen’ written on them. These are quite obviously sleeping pills.”

I asked him if he was all right. ‘Funnily enough, it’s quite a nice feeling,’ he said

“Obvious to a pillhead like you, maybe, but I had no idea. They were in a jar labeled Nurofen, for fuck’s sake.” “But didn’t you realize you’d taken sleeping pills last weekend when you suddenly fell asleep in the middle of the day?” “No. I thought I had a migraine.”

Round and round we went, while our teenage son wandered about the kitchen in a daze, bumping into furniture. When we remembered him, we raced downstairs and asked him if he was all right. “Funnily enough, it’s quite a nice feeling,” he said, using the island to prop himself up. “‘D’ you think it would help if I had a beer?” “Emphatically not,” I replied. “Happy now?” asked Caroline. “You’ve turned our son into a drug addict. He’ll be homeless within 12 months.” “I didn’t give him the drugs!”

The annoying thing is Freddie has his A-levels in a few weeks and this was his first weekend of “study leave.” Caroline and I had told him he had to spend at least four hours a day revising, a regime which was supposed to begin that Saturday. But he wouldn’t get very far going through past papers in physics, math and divinity in a drug-addled haze. What if he now gets straight Es? He’ll blame his parents for dosing him up on downers.

“Here,” I said to Freddie, handing him a bag of crisps. “Eat these while I make you a double espresso.” After several cups, he began to feel better and was able to join us for supper with two friends, although he didn’t do any work that evening. I’ve now removed the zopiclone from the Nurofen bottle, put them in a Tupperware box and stuck a label on it saying “Sleeping pills.” I’ve taken the precaution of hiding it just in case Freddie has acquired a taste for them. Caroline is still convinced I bear sole responsibility for the unfortunate episode.