Prescription Drugs: Are We Swallowing Our Happiness?

Conspiracy theorist, I am not. But lately I’m feeling a bit more paranoid than usual. I don’t know what’s happening exactly, and I know even less why I seem to be the only one who thinks something is happening at all. But suffice it to say that everyone I know is on one kind of prescription drug or another. And what’s worse is that these same people have been brainwashed into thinking that their pills hold the key to a happy and healthy life. And so they wait. But from my vantage point (which is un-medicated), here’s where I see the glitch. Not only are the individuals popping pills not happy, but they now suffer from new problems that are caused by the drugs themselves. But they keep swallowing. And then I wonder, if it’s so obvious that they are not feeling better, how come they don’t notice that the pills aren’t working? It’s as if they’ve all fallen under a spell cast by those wearing white lab coats. But what I can’t decide is, who to blame - the drug companies who fashion the illnesses and then manipulate our most fundamental fears of sickness and death in their not-so-subliminal advertising that inundates us morning, noon and night - or the trigger-happy doctors who write the scripts. Doesn’t anyone besides me think it is the most egregious act in the world to advertise medicine directly to the consumer? To sell medicine? To provide coupons for drugs? To send people to a website to take a quiz that diagnoses them? Have we all lost our minds?

Granted, the biggest jokes have come from the Viagra commercials where a suave masculine voice warns against the potential dangers of the four-hour (or longer) erection that could result from taking the drug – like that’s a bad thing. As if they didn’t know that even an outside chance of an uber erection would sell more pills. Personally though, as far as side-effects are concerned, I think it’s hard to choose which drug to fear most. I would have to say that on the top of my list was the pill that can make you vomit coffee grinds with every violent heave. But my all time favorite ad was the one that cautioned users to expect a possible “greasy odoriferous discharge.” I don’t know about you, but I would do just about anything to avoid that. And I’m guessing that I wasn’t alone because that commercial went off the air as quickly as it came on. No doubt, sales dipped as a result and some poor deprived sales rep somewhere missed his quota and the chance to win a trip to Hawaii. I guess in the case of Viagra and its brothers, despite the appeal of the never ending hard on, the cases of blindness that they found linked to the drug in Europe weren’t enough to scare people away.

The fact is that I’ve yet to find one guy who can’t get it up (for reasons other than drinking too much) who takes Viagra for legitimate medical reasons. Oh yeah, I forgot, except for the convicted rapists who get it through Medicaid. However, mixed with cocktails and other psychotropic drugs, I understand that it makes for a rather enjoyable evening. But I do have a friend who was given a prescription for Viagra shortly after she was given an antidepressant to alleviate minor symptoms of irritability and sadness associated with her menstrual cycle. It all started one day when she was lying on her couch in a suicidal state after ingesting a popular white pill for two weeks. At first blush, I found myself asking, “Isn’t that pill supposed to be an anti-depressant?” Naturally, the operative word here was “anti.” I couldn’t help but notice that her sudden desire to actually take her own life was not boding well for this drug, nor was it a sign that her depression was improving. All she had had was a little PMS each month, for heaven's sake.

I don’t know, let me see…a few days of feeling a little off, maybe slightly edgy, a condition endured by women for centuries, or having a newfound desire to bleed out, never to wake up again. Which is better? Gosh, I’m torn. What happened was that my friend’s doctor had placed her on 90 milligrams of the drug right out of the gate – no tests, no analysis, no nothing. And, no surprise the guy’s wall was decorated with elegantly framed degrees. Oddly enough however, none had the words “psychology,” “psychiatry” or “OBGYN” anywhere on them. Perhaps he too had seen the commercial the night before and decided it was worth a shot. My friend went to another doctor next who was indeed a shrink, a psycho-pharma-something. He was not surprised at all that thoughts of cutting her skull open with a kitchen knife ran rampant through her head, because he said, “Well of course you don’t feel good. You’re actively being poisoned, basically becoming more and more toxic every day.” “Well gee,” I thought. “Isn’t that dangerous? Shouldn’t someone have known better?” So that doctor slowly brought her down to 5 milligrams and then planned to wean her off completely. FIVE MILLIGRAMS! And she had been on 90! Is it me?

The good news is that my friend’s soaring libido took her mind off her desire to die and gave her something to live for. The problem was that she couldn’t concentrate on anything else. That is, until a commercial and its online survey convinced her that she had ADD – a medical problem that impinged on her mind’s ability to focus.

So her doctor gave her a prescription and told her that she might have trouble sleeping but that she shouldn’t worry about it, because he had something for that too.

Shocker. Now that she was too tired to have sex and sleeping too much to be depressed, I figured we should take matters into our own hands. I suggested in jest that we might as well go over to the East Village to find a dealer of our own, one who didn’t take insurance, and buy her some speed. She cracked a barely perceptible smile as her eyes filled up with tears. Dreading news that the depression was settling back in, I cringed and asked her why she was crying. She assured me that she wasn’t, that sometimes her eyes watered from the drops that the doctor gave her to moisturize them when they dried out from the ADD medicine that kept her awake, and the sleeping pills that put her to sleep. I was concerned. She then told me there was nothing to worry about, unless of course “the foreign body sensations” kicked in, in which case she was to notify her doctor immediately. What? I couldn’t even comprehend what “foreign body sensations” meant. Were they from the whole body, or a specific part? Was she going to vibrate, ache or tingle? Or maybe foreign meant outer body? I had to know. So I asked if I could read the label on the package. Sure enough, she was right. There it was on the bottle in black and white along with all of the other side effects. But next to it was something else, a word that I hadn’t seen before – pruritus. So I asked Jeeves. Turns out, pruritus is chronic itching of the skin around the anus. From eye drops? Luckily my friend was pruritus-free. Good thing too because I was not looking forward to watching her scoot along the rug like my dog. So then, one night I’m sitting on my couch watching TV, when low and behold a commercial for one of my friend’s drugs comes on. And at the end, a soft, upbeat melodic voice says, and I quote, “SIDE EFFECTS INCLUDE… POSSIBLE FATAL EVENTS!" And I thought to myself, “Ah, jeez, the irony of it – she’s right back where she started…only a pill away from stopping the depression.” I mean, what happened to the good ole days when we took drugs that actually made us feel better?