I don't remember her doing that, but who knows! I do remember helping myself to it without any hint of a cough, though, as a teenager, which in hindsight was not the best situation.

For some reason my mother used to have a large bottle of codeine as cough medicine at all times (in the 1990s), and I had it quite often. It's not great for chesty coughs, though, as it stops you from coughing the stuff up and out of your system.