Drug Up Your Teen Today!

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Drug Up Your Teen Today!

This just in: Prozac is a better treatment than talking to your kid. Isn't life

fabulous?

- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

 

Friday, June 4, 2004

 

 

 

Is your teenager depressed? Throwing things? Sulking like she hates you and only

speaking in monosyllabic grunts and playing her Staind or Avril Lavigne or

Hoobastank MP3s way too loud? Sure she is. Damn kids.

Are they slouching way too much and wearing low-slung clothes and locking the

door to their bedrooms and masturbating chronically, and then racking up huge

cell-phone bills as they complain endlessly to their best friend about their

unrequited loves and horrible parents and how much they hate life and how

they're always despondent and put upon and pimply and miserable?

Solution: You need to give them drugs. Lots of drugs. Expensive ones with nice

little corporate logos on them. This is the only way.

Haven't you been reading the papers? Watching the commercials? Drugs are in.

Drugs are the new black. Drugs rain down from the sky like pretty purple

Skittles. Drugs are mandatory and the most important advancement in child

rearing since the invention of the cane and the padlock and the Catholic priest.

No, not the bad drugs. Not the drugs that cool people take and that make your

kids party hard and dance all night and that make their eyes all red and mushy

and makes colors swirl and skin feel like honey and makes them horny or hungry

or feel really really good for awhile, until they don't. Not the ones that are

cheaply produced and impossible to regulate and as easy to get as degrading

sexual misinformation in public schools is. Not those.

No, your kid needs the other kind of drugs. The good kind. The kind prescribed

by overpaid shrinks after the kid's umpteenth $300 visit. The kind that run

about seven bucks a pop and are made by Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline or maybe Eli

Lilly, and which are roughly three times more toxic and 10 times more synthetic

and a thousand times more spiritually debilitating than the " evil " street stuff,

given how they're totally legal and corporate sponsored and therefore radiate

this sinister venomous aura of happy culturally approved doom.

Behavioral modifiers. Prozac. Paxil. Zoloft. Effexor. Xanax. Et al. You name it,

your kids can have it, and probably should. Millions are already addicted.

Millions more will be by the end of this year, if not by the end of this column.

Maybe you're one of them, yourself. Hi. Isn't the sky lovely today? Yes, it sure

is.

Just look at them, the well-drugged teens of America, all calm and happily

narcotized, walking around with their eyes glazed over and their shirts untucked

and their souls drained of all vital juices. God bless America at its

world-record 25 percent mood-disorder rate! The most-drugged nation on the

planet! We're No. 1! So proud.

 

Don't you want your child happy and well-adjusted and violently, chemically

torqued, his or her entire body ravaged by enough synthetic compounds and

serotonin reuptake inhibitors and mood enhancers to numb a horse? Of course you

do.

Hey, they've done studies. Studies that finally prove once and for all that

Prozac is much more effective on your depressed miserable slouchy door-slammin'

punkass teen than merely talking to him and loving him well and teaching him to

appreciate life and sex and spirituality and fine artisan cheeses. So you know

it must be true.

And do you know why? Why the Prozac is more effective? Because it's a potent

chemical narcotic, silly! It rewires their brains and poisons their little

juvenile blood vessels and kills any pesky burgeoning testosteroned sex drive

once and for all!

Imagine! No more worries! No more teen pregnancy! It's just like neutering your

dog! Or getting a catalytic converter on the car! Or laying down beige shag

carpeting everywhere! Everything calm and soft and nonirritating, all edges

filed right down. Isn't pharmacology fabulous?

Never you mind the pesky lawsuits. Like the one just filed by the New York

attorney general against Glaxo over how they supposedly suppressed a bunch of

studies that proved how their beloved zim-zammer brain-slammer Paxil made a

bunch of kids even more twitchy and despondent and, whoops, suicidal.

Shhh. Hey, it was only a handful of kids, all right? Maybe, like, 10. Or 50. Who

knows? " Acceptable losses, " as they say in military parlance. Small price to pay

for a whirling nation of numb smiling partially lobotomized teens who will open

the door for you and say yes sir and no ma'am and wash you car for a dollar. Am

I right? Goddamn right.

Never you mind, furthermore, that we have become a nation of sweetly drug-addled

automatons begging at the hand of the giant pharmcos, and that only a teeny-tiny

fraction of the kids whose parents now have them sucking down behavioral meds

like M & Ms actually needs them, actually has severe enough brain issues and

chemical imbalances and psychoemotional traumas that these drugs are small

miracles.

Nossir, never you mind that the rest of those millions of nubile doe-eyed

Prozac/Zoloft/Xanax teen addicts are merely being medicated to death for no

viable reason whatsoever, other than the fact that they're just a bunch of angry

depressed miserable angst-ridden teens and their parents are sick of trying to

cope with it.

But, wait, isn't the angry-teen thing a part of life? Isn't that a mandatory

stage for just about every kid nationwide, right before they evolve past it and

their skin clears up and they finally get laid and then get old enough to drink

and buy a minivan and have kids and finally join AA like good Christian adults?

And is it worth noting, again, that most of our drug-happy nation is merely

seeking sad, silver-bullet relief from what has become a truly staggering and

vicious array of social and government-sponsored ills, and are merely poisoning

their bodies and numbing their minds simply because they're stressed and bored

and overworked and undersexed?

Whoops, sorry. Got carried away there. Let's stay focused on the kids. Happy,

happy kids. Let's not get away from the frightening fact that the U.S. now

harbors millions -- millions! -- of Prozac-addicted teens and no one blinks an

eye, and yet one kid ODs on ecstasy at a rave due to rampant insulting misinfo

put out by the CDC and suddenly it's furrowed brows and pointing fingers and

scrunched imbecilic senators railroading the moronic RAVE Act through Congress

as they suck down another fistful of Vicodin with their fourth martini. The

simpering hypocrites.

Whoops, sorry again. No name-calling. That never gets us anywhere. Guess I'm

just getting a bit angry. Maybe a little frustrated at the rampant wholesale

corporate-sponsored government-enhanced parentally condoned drugging of kids in

this country, and what that means for our future, and theirs, and the future of

their attitudes and perspectives and the deterioration of their brains, penises,

souls, karmas, love lives, vibration, evolutionary status.

Maybe I'm just getting a little too goddamn depressed by it all. Maybe I just

need a pill. And a drink. Ahhh, there now. Much better. Thank you, Eli Lilly.

We're No. 1!

 

 

 

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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF

Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does.

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