Last week, my cat caught me eating a cough drop without any valid medical reason. As she looked at me with 5% more disdain than usual, I couldn’t help but go down a train of thought — one that has been haunting me for several months. Is it really such a crime to eat cough drops when you don’t have a cough?

After all, my house contains an almost suffocating amount of cough drops. To put it into perspective, if every human and every cat living in the building ate one cough drop a day, we would still probably have enough to last until the country’s collapse, which might not be saying much, but still, our cough drop supply could be described as a “drowning hazard.” Every day, I attend Zoom classes and do my homework sitting only two feet away from a bag of cough drops, and I can’t help but dig in. 

One could probably go as far as to say that I’m actually doing us all a favor by snacking on handfuls of cough drops. If left alone, those cough drops could end up congealing and developing sentience or something. What if those cough drops ended up being extremely good at archaeology? It’d be pretty embarrassing for humans if cough drops ended up outdoing us in that particular field. I should honestly be eating even more cough drops.

Also, who’s to say that I’m not actually preemptively defending myself from coughs? What if I just predicted that I would have coughs for several weeks straight and adjusted my lifestyle accordingly? I’ll have you know that I haven’t coughed once since I started eating cough drops. It’s pretty clear that they’ve had some kind of effect on my vulnerability to coughing.

In my humble opinion, if they really didn’t want people to eat cough drops, they wouldn’t have made them taste so good.

Here at the Clog, we aren’t supposed to dip our toes too far into politics. However, this is a cause that we must fight for. 2021 must be the year that we destigmatize eating cough drops as a snack.

This is a satirical article written purely for entertainment purposes.