2025-06-15 – Health – www.theguardian.com
Desperate dads meet in car parks to exchange packets; exhausted parents slip it into their kids’ drinks; families waiting months for prescriptions buy it ‘off label’. But is it worth the risk?
The first time I gave him a gummy, I thought, ‘Oh my God, have I killed him?’ He just passed out in front of the TV. That never happens.” Jen is remembering giving her son, David, six, melatonin to help him sleep. She got them from a friend, a paediatrician who gave them to her own child. “It was sort of hilarious. She had half a tub of gummies, and her husband met my husband in a car park near a roundabout to hand them over, like some underhand black-market deal.” Her tone is light, but in fact she and her husband were becoming increasingly desperate for sleep. “They were like gold dust.”
By meeting in the car park to exchange the gummies, the husbands weren’t breaking the law, exactly, but they were stepping into a legal grey area. Melatonin is a synthetic version of…