Afrin Nasal Spray “Addict” gets national headlines, and I’ve officially seen enough

Times are tough this week. We’re all killing time until the Phillies’ NLDS kicks off Saturday, ignoring AJ Brown’s cryptic tweets (the Birds are 4-0, who cares), and now the New York Post wants us to feel sympathy for… an Afrin Nasal Spray addict.

The article highlights a woman who carried bottles everywhere, woke up in the middle of the night to spray, and even had a meltdown in a Moroccan airport when she accidentally checked her Afrin instead of keeping it in her carry-on.

Her dad had to sprint back through security to buy more. Doctors told her to stop. She went “cold turkey,” slipped a few times, and now she’s a viral TikTok survivor story.

Afrin Nasal Spray Addict:

@scaredandsobbing

Replying to @Dude.Abides my journey quitting ~Afrin~ (ft my bird lmao)

♬ original sound – meme

New York Post Article on Afrin Nasal Spray Addict:

“I would wake up maybe twice a night, maybe once a night, depending on how bad it was, and I would need to spray Afrin into my nose because I could not breathe and it felt like I was dying,” she said. 

“Twice I did it cold turkey, it was miserable,” she said in another Tiktok. “I think it took me a week until I could finally sleep and like, start breathing.”

Even then, she admitted to “some slip-ups” that made her fall back into the habit.

I used Afrin too except I emptied those bottles, filled them with liquid LSD, and tripped through South Philly for years. Honestly, that feels like a way better use than snorting saline mist every couple hours.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that your body can definitely get dependent on a decongestant but calling yourself an addict because of… Afrin?

That’s soft. Really soft.

Actual addicts are out here fighting off Oxy 80s, Perc 30s, heroin, coke, crack, whatever they could get their hands on. I was one of them. God willing, I’ve been off the hard stuff for nearly a decade now, so I get to joke about it.

I don’t even know how you “recover” from Afrin.

Do you just… stop using it?

It’s not like there are withdrawal symptoms. Is it really that hard to breathe through your mouth for a few days until your nose resets like a normal human being?

I didn’t know blowing your nose with a tissue was a noble act worthy of headlines.

What are we even doing here?

This is where TikTok has broken people’s brains. Instead of dealing with actual issues, we’ve got folks posting teary confessionals about Afrin and pretending they survived a war. And now the New York Post is filing it under “Addiction” like it belongs in the same conversation as the opioid crisis.

Meanwhile, in 2023, around 105,000 people in the U.S. died from overdoses. Nearly 76% involved opioids, mostly fentanyl. That’s addiction. That’s tragedy. Not having a panic attack on an airplane because your decongestant was in the wrong bag.

Again, I’ve been off real drugs for nearly a decade, and I’ll never downplay how brutal that road is but I refuse to lump Afrin in with it. The pharmacies of the world aren’t locking up Afrin behind glass cases because of an epidemic.

It’s over-the-counter nasal spray.

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