Americans’ drug of choice

Americans’ drug of choice: anything that can be prescribed.

If it’s not restless legs, erectile dysfunction or an overactive bladder, then there must be something else wrong with us. No matter what your ailment is, the drug makers have a pill to peddle.

Just ask your doctor if Cure-it-All is right for you, as every ad likes to say. He or she surely will prescribe something to fix the problem, even if the side effects often sound a lot worse.

“America has become the world’s greatest medicine show,” author Melody Petersen writes in the introduction to her new book, Our Daily Meds, published by Sarah Crichton Books.

Petersen, who covered the pharmaceutical industry for four years for The New York Times until 1997, has put together a harrowing tale of how the pharmaceutical industry has hooked the nation on prescription drugs to the tune of more than $250 billion in annual sales—more money than is spent on gasoline and fast food.
I stayed up the other night to read her book and then couldn’t get to sleep even after I took an Ambien pill.

If you regularly watch the evening network news, like me, and switch from Williams to Gibson to Couric, you’ll notice without fail that most of the sponsors are pharmaceutical companies pushing pills to lighten your burden, real or imagined. No matter what the channel, there’s Sally Field touting a once-a-month tablet to strengthen the bones or some middle-aged guy singing Viva Viagra or a guy sitting in a bathtub with his wife, pumped with Cialis, waiting for the “right moment” so he can “be ready.”

What is it with these sex pills anyway? You’d think most of the men in America couldn’t rise to the occasion any more if you watch these commercials. With apologies to Pete Seeger, where has all the testosterone gone?

And just to show that I’m not just picking on guys, a reported 43 percent of the female population is said to suffer from “sexual dysfunction.” This came from a 1999 article in the respected Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), not considered to be a crackpot outfit. This condition is characterized, one must assume, by her declaring, “Not tonight, honey, I got a headache.” America doesn’t exactly come off as the Land of Libido.

Not to minimize medical problems, but you have to wonder whether the country is dangerously overdosed. I’m sure there are many meds that help people live better lives—I’ve popped a sleep aid or pain pill in my time—but let’s not get carried away with the notion that there’s a miracle remedy for every disorder.

Drug dependency clearly is out of control and for just one bit of proof, let’s note this sad statistic: America accounts for 66 percent of the global antidepressant market. Prozac, anyone?

Better yet, invent a new disease—Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD)—and a new antidepressant—Paxil—and the money will just keep rolling in. Produced by pharmaceutical giant Glaxo SmithKline, Paxil was the first and only FDA-approved medication for the treatment of SAD, which, we are told,13 percent of Americans suffer from.

This is not to say that anxiety disorders and phobias aren’t real, but that if they do exist they can be successfully treated with cognitive therapy rather than drugs, according to many medical experts. But drug companies don’t really seem as interested in cures as they do in the more profitable practice of medicating us for the rest of our lives.

Petersen observes, “As the medicine merchants have poured billions of dollars into selling their wares, they have become America’s most powerful industry.In the process, they have transformed American life. The small white-capped whiskey-colored bottles that once took up a corner of the bathroom cabinet now play a role in lives that few products can match. Almost 65 percent of the nation now takes a drug available by prescription.”

Good Lord! Two-thirds of us are regular pill poppers!

For supporting evidence, all you need to know is that the pharmaceutical industry spends a reported $15 billion a year on public relations and marketing—twice as much as it does on drug research and development. Ads typically magnify the benefits of medication while other ways of dealing with problems are ignored.

New diseases are created with the help of PR firms that aim to create a “buzz” about the newest drug. For example, Pfizer spent $1 billion to kick-start Viagra 10 years ago and since has made billions peddling the little blue pill. Not to be outdone, the rival makers of Levitra and Cialis quickly jumped on the erectile dysfunction bandwagon to push their pills.

The close ties between drug companies and doctors is well established, but only one state—Minnesota—requires public reports of company marketing payments to physicians. Doctors typically will say that the payments they receive don’t influence what they prescribe for their patients. Anybody want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?

Don’t take my word for it. The New York Times reported in May 2007 that an analysis of Minnesota records found that drug payments to psychiatrists rose more than six-fold from 2000 to 2005 to $1.6 million, while at the same time prescriptions for antipsychotics for children jumped ninefold.

Quoting from the Times story, “These best-selling drugs, including Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Abilify and Geodon, are now being prescribed to more than half a million children in the United States to help parents deal with behavior problems despite profound risks and almost no approved uses for minors.”

Drug companies are constantly coming up with “magic bullets” to cure all our ills by inventing a host of newly-created maladies such as “Attention Deficit Disorder,” which in the old days sat under the umbrella of “dim-witted.” Nowadays, if your kid can’t pay attention or is hyperactive the easy answer is Ritalin or a drug equivalent that produces the same pharmacological effects as cocaine. Nothing like turning kids into drug addicts.

Yes, indeed, sickness sells. Whether it’s mental illness, which we’re told affects one-third of the U.S. population, irritable bowel syndrome, high cholesterol. fibromyalgia (at one time diagnosed as a simple pain in the neck) or low bone density, there’s a capsule out there waiting to be swallowed.

The Federal Drug Administration is charged with making sure drugs are safe and effective, but the fact is that Congress calls the shots. That’s because drug companies have one of the strongest lobbies on Capitol Hill and these companies have one or more lobbyist assigned to every single member of Congress to hype their agendas as it relates to laws governing drug use and funding for research.

Well, this effort to alert readers about the dangers of taking too many drugs has left me in a state of hyper-electronic exhaustion compounded by advancing carpal tunnel syndrome with an uncertain prognosis. In the old days, this would have been known simply as writer’s cramp and I would have taken two aspirin and been fine the next day.

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June 8, 2008 | Filed Under Cialis Online, Levitra Online, Viagra Online

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Americans’ drug of choice

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