Calamine Gets the Rub : Standbys: It’s easy for the FDA to say the gooey pink lotion is useless. But what about the rest of us who grew up with the stuff?

It’s gonna take an ocean

Of calamine lotion . . .

--From the 1959 Coasters’ hit “Poison Ivy”

Picture those fellows at the FDA standing around in their laboratories, elbow-deep in pink, gooey stuff. Imagine their white jackets coated in this goop that makes a gross, chalky powder after it starts to dry.

Envision these guys keeping a straight face as they inform the taxpayers of America that calamine lotion doesn’t work after all.

What?

What about all those years that we watched our mothers worship that little pink bottle?

It won’t show at all.

Right, Mom -- if you happen to have skin the color of a guava.

What about all those years that we went off to school with Abstract Expressionist splotches all over our mosquito bites?

Eeee-ew, look, Bobby’s got pink crud all over him! Yuck!

What about all those years that we perpetuated the big lie of childhood with our own kids, smearing calamine all over them when they came home with a rash from poison oak or some other creepy-crawly condition?

It won’t show at all.

David A. Kessler, the director of the FDA, took a rather heartless approach to his agency’s destruction of one of childhood’s sacred rituals.

“We are taking this action because no proof has been submitted to FDA that shows the ingredients are effective for the conditions claimed,” he said last week.

Easy for you to say, Dr. Kessler. Only guess what? Large segments of the American population are lamenting that their lives may never be the same.

“They’re undermining the icons of our culture,” moaned Michael Byrne, who grew up serving as mosquito bait in South Texas, and who actually believed his mother when she said the calamine lotion wouldn’t show at all. These days, Byrne has a desk job at the UCLA Medical Center, where most bugs are found under microscopes.

“It’s never been shown to be effective,” said Betsy Adams, at the FDA, bolstering her boss’s cruel shattering of the calamine cult.

But old habits are hard to break.

Judy Chandler, a second-grade teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area community of Hercules, said that in recent years, her school’s nurse has given her a bottle of calamine lotion to keep in her classroom. Moreover, when kids begin scratching suspiciously, Chandler said she sends them to the office and “they always come back blotchy.” Proof positive that they have been painted with the powerful pink potion.

In Orinda, Anne Woods, the director of a yuppie youth program called the Roughing It Camp, said calamine “has certainly been a staple for many years” for camp counselors.

“That and Fels Naptha soap,” Woods said, providing a clue as to what itchy kids and grown-ups may fall back on now that calamine has been discredited.

In fairness, those iconoclasts at the Food and Drug Administration did not go so far as to say calamine was bad--just that it was useless. Specifically, Kessler and his merry band of pharmaceutical rogues said the ages-old mixture of zinc oxide and ferric oxide could be sold as a “skin protectant,” but not as an “external analgesic.”

“Safety is not the issue,” the FDA’s Mike Shaffer said. “Effectiveness is.”

Over time, Shaffer predicted, calamine will disappear for the purpose of relieving itchy skin. It will become the dinosaur of dermatology, with other products taking its place in the saga of scratchdom.

“You know, I’ve heard of people putting toothpaste on insect bites,” Shaffer said.

But Sandy Horner, at Warner-Lambert Pharmaceuticals in Morris Plains, N.J., said that all was not lost for rose-colored splotches. Future generations of bug-bitten Americans, Horner said, may yet grow up to know the glories of masquerading as modern art.

Caladryl, produced under Warner-Lambert’s Parke-Davis label, remains unaffected by the new FDA ruling, Horner said. Caladryl relies on another ingredient for analgesic qualities and uses calamine for skin-protectant purposes only.

“I’m happy to say that I’ll still be having all those pink dots every summer,” Horner said.