Take Your Pills:-)

[Guest guest]

===== The (San Francisco) Morning Fix =====

November 21, 2003 -- Bjork turns 38 today

By Mark Morford - morningfix

" Lube up, lean into the fire, and laugh "

~~ nil desperandum ~~

 

== Mark's Notes & Errata ==

Where opinion meets benign syntax abuse

 

Giant Floating Purple Pills

Are those creepy prescription-drug commercials on TV trying to kill

you?

By Mark Morford

 

Cut to picture of healthy-looking yuppie guy emerging from swimming

pool and smiling.

 

Cut to picture of mother twirling her child in the park in slo-mo.

Cut to picture of woman

taking deep whiffs of fresh-cut lilies at the florist and grinning

warmly as if the world was

one big gob of perky happy fluffy bunny joy. Yay. Drugs. Yay.

 

Celebrex can make you feel like you again. Celebrex is a

revolutionary new breakthrough in

medicine technology. Celebrex is not for everyone. Ask your doctor

if Celebrex is right for

you.

 

Side effects may include nausea diarrhea anxiety sleeplessness

headaches projectile

vomiting genital warts narcolepsy halitosis death bed wetting

pained nightmares involving

angry bloodsucking poodles and the mad uncontrollable desire to

smash your head into a

brick wall over and over again until you stop screaming.

 

Do not use Celebrex if you are recently deceased. Do not use

Celebrex if you are already

experiencing heart palpitations or night sweats or screaming

terrified wolf howls or if you

take any other medication that begins with the letter C.

 

Pregnant or nursing mothers should not use Celebrex, unless you

want your child to

become a mutant deformed pygmy three-armed libertarian with 17 toes

and the IQ of a

small canned ham.

 

If you are absolutely certain nothing is wrong with you and you

feel fine and hence you do

not need Celebrex, this is actually the first troubling sign that

Celebrex is exactly what you

need. Contact your doctor immediately, if not sooner.

 

If you are right now watching this TV commercial for Celebrex and

have no idea what the

hell Celebrex is because we don't ever actually tell you what the

hell it is, and, hence, if

you feel the pharmaceutical industry is this freakish mega-powerful

mind-control cult fully

bent on convincing as much of the human population as possible that

wildly expensive

prescription meds are the answer to all your problems, this, too,

means you should take

our medication, pronto.

 

And if you go so far as to dare to think that maybe, just maybe,

alternative medicine or

homeopathy or just becoming much, much more aware of your life and

what you eat and

how you live might, in fact, negate the need for a great many of

the drugs we manufacture,

and if you believe that we might actually invent bogus ailments and

drill a fear of them into

the cultural consciousness, all in order to supply you with the

narcotics to treat them, well,

have we got a nice pill for you.

 

Sound familiar? It should. It was in 1997 that the FDA finally

loosened the rules on DTCA

(direct-to-consumer advertising), finally let them loose upon the

unsuspecting and

completely unprepared populace, and thus were major pharmaceutical

companies given the

right to advertise like savage and shameless maniacs on national

television.

 

And they were allowed to hawk extremely expensive and often toxic

drugs designed to

relieve you of various debilitating ailments, but not even really

tell you what those products

actually do, or why, or how much they cost, or anything at all

except for a quick charming

listing of possible side effects, each of which seems to involve

some sort of stomach recoil

and skin eruption and painful bowel shift.

 

But there was a study. There is always a study. By the Kaiser

Family Foundation. A

couple years ago. It said that one in eight people who saw a drug

commercial on TV did, in

fact, ask their doctor about it, and 44 percent of those actually

got themselves a

prescription for that drug.

 

Sadly enough, drug ads work. In 1997, pharmcos spent $791 million

on TV ads. Today that

figure is well over $3 billion. This is why you can't turn on the

TV without seeing some

inexplicable commercial for some bizarre-sounding drug that

features as its active

ingredient siflintrate oxygtoralnyzincotim but which they call

Happium or maybe Numbium.

Drugs have become just another everyday consumer good, like

Campbell's soup or Windex

or a new Toyota Camry.

 

A swarm of giant purple pills gently fall from the azure sky,

rotating slowly as they fall, like

a rain of Skittles, like manna from the gods of Merck. A

well-drugged housewife happily

bakes cookies with her children as a bird sings on the windowsill.

Happy narcotized

citizens of America go about their business, usually in slow

motion, always grinning

calmly, the colors of the world oversaturated and utopian and

creepy.

 

Lipitor. Nexium. Singulair. Vioxx. Vanceril. Xenical. Zyrtec.

Allegra. Avandia. Claritin. Zoloft.

Ritalin. Valtrex. Viagra. Flonase. Prinivil. Meridia. Prilosec.

Provocal. Ditropan. All on TV.

All aimed straight at consumers. All sounding like a new model from

Acura.

 

Many of these drugs are, of course, beneficial to a great many

people, but every single one

crosses over that modest boundary of limited need and is heavily

overmarketed and

overprescribed and wickedly expensive, its promised results

misleading and even

dangerous.

 

And many of these drugs are, in the long haul, quite likely more

toxic and destructive to the

mind and body than pot or cocaine or ecstasy. But, hey, as every

major oil CEO and

BushCo warmonger and Wal-Mart exec knows, education and common

sense are the true

enemies of profit.

 

Simply put, it is in the vested interest of every pharmco in the

world to convince as many

doctors as possible to prescribe their drugs, wining and dining

them and sending them

elaborate gifts and buying them hookers and booze and cars and lost

weekends during

ridiculously lavish weeklong drug symposiums at the Bellagio in

Vegas. Hey, just ask any

M.D. -- this happens far, far more than you think. And, by the way,

you have not seen the

very embodiment of slick smarm until you've met a professionally

groomed and carefully

hatched drug rep from a major pharmaceutical corporation. Beware.

 

But now, much to their overall sinister glee, pharmcos no longer

have to market solely to

doctors. And they can also pass right over your neighborhood

pharmacist, the specialist

who's actually specifically trained in this sort of thing, who

actually knows more than

almost any doctor about prescription meds and what chemical does

what to whom and

why.

 

After all, why try to convince the wary professionals and experts

when you can market

straight to the gullible and the trusting and the easily duped?

America is sick sick sick,

besotted by a hundred thousand ailments, each one more icky and

ravaging than the last.

This is what they are selling. This is the underlying message. This

is why you need their

drugs.

 

And this is why television is their ultimate medium, allowing them

to convince as many

consumers as possible that they must demand a prescription for that

neat-o pretty purple

pill they saw on TV because, as we all know, if it's on television,

it must be good.

 

We have become a nation completely inured to seeing giant pretty

pills floating across our

TV screens like they were just another can of Cheez-Whiz. Hell,

even the FDA says many

of these ads are seriously misleading, and has issued numerous

warning letters to

countless pharmcos for intentionally lying to consumers about the

efficacy of their

chemicals.

 

No matter. Few are demanding any drastic change to the ads, as

Bush-backed

corporations have more power than they've had since the industrial

revolution, and, hence,

nuanced awareness of corporate calculation, of what is being sold

to us -- from war to

jingoist ideology to the mountain of legal drugs we happily pump

into our bodies -- seems

to be at an all-time low.

 

But it's OK. That sadness and bitterness and overall disgust you

might feel about all this?

That sense that you are losing control, that they have far too much

power and reach and

you have too few defenses and they will soon be marketing Ritalin

and kiddie Prozac

straight to your child during " Spongebob " commercial breaks? Fear

not. Just relax. They

have a pill for that, too.