It's an acquired taste

I respectfully disagree. I’d rather have one of these than an actual root beer.

There's a concept called "learned food aversion", which is just a fancy way of saying when people eat something and get sick shortly afterwards, people tend to avoid that food in the future. It makes sense from a survival perspective. If our ancestors ate a berry that was poisonous, they'd stop eating that berry.

This can suck as well though. If you eat your favorite food and then get sick from something else, then you can naturally start to not like your favorite food any more.

As a result, when patients are about to start chemotherapy, doctors might give them something like root beer flavored candy. That way, cancer patients will associate being sick with root beer candy rather than whatever they had for lunch that day.

You can dip it in the ashtray for extra flavor.

I don't know if I've had this brand but I did always enjoy a root beer tootsie pop

Edit: wait a second, I'm misremembering. However I distinctly recall the chocolatey flavour of those pops seperately from the memory of the root beer ones. Maybe I did have the ones pictured in OP. Or maybe they changed the available flavours?

Guess someone remembers Kojak