Your Favorite Childhood Candy Was a Poisonous Drug. Here’s Why It Disappeared.
The beloved Pagoda Candy of Chinese childhoods was not a treat but a potent deworming drug with dangerous side effects. Its main ingredient, santonin, extracted from a plant that went extinct in China due to overproduction and market failure, reveals how nostalgia can blind us to toxic truths—and how medical progress sometimes tastes bitter.