Usually off-brand, or uncoated, medications taste extremely bitter. Painkillers, antihistamines, antidepressants and various others come to mind. Why is this? Since all the medications are different, why are they seemingly universally bitter?
In: Chemistry
So the kids don’t find them palatable and pop them like candy. In general pills are either color or shape (or usually both) coded, and small, so kids can find it interesting. To reduce the risk, they’re normally made bitter to deter the little curious hands and tongues.
Medications, by nature, are fucking with your body chemistry. Normally, the word for something that fucks with your body chemistry is “poison” – and indeed, most of those things would harm or even kill you in larger doses. Your body isn’t adapted for taking an exact dose prescribed by a doctor, it’s adapted for “hey, this berry might be poisonous and we have no way of dosing on it precisely, let’s not eat it”.
Actually, you missed the world’s most widely used psychoactive drug in that list: caffeine, which also happens to be quite bitter.
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