DRUGGED UP LITTLE MONKEYS

Last night, my grandmother and I had a very interesting discussion while I was visiting her. She is of the age group where she is “expected” to be taking a wide variety of drugs, yet she refuses. Yes, she has some health problems, but has been managing them just fine with the use of vitamins and natural alternatives.

Her sister finds this appalling. Doesn’t she understand how much better she would feel if she would just go to the doctor and get a prescription for drug X, Y and Z?

Despite the pressure from her sibling, she won’t do it. We talked about how many people her age take one drug to deal with this problem, but that drug causes a side-effect which in turn must be treated with this other drug, which has its own side-effects which can be treated with yet another drug, and so on and so on until one is popping hundreds of dollars of pills a week and still feeling terrible.

No, she’s happier dealing with aging as a natural process as opposed to seeing it as a medical emergency which must be prescribed into oblivion. This conversation turned into a discussion in general of the culture we live in and how its attitudes contribute to prescription drug use and abuse. Half way into it she asked, in all seriousness, “What are we going to do about it?” Meaning, I think, what were she and I going to do about it as opposed to the culture at large. Though it isn’t much – the proverbial drop in the bucket – I promised her that I would write about what we discussed and post it here.

Really, if she were twenty years younger, I swear I’d have her out in the streets waving signs at protests and writing angry yet articulate letters to her senator. She really is a pretty radical granny.

Not having much access to (and no interest in) television, I told her how shocked I was a few years ago the first time that I saw a commercial for prescription drugs while I was visiting my parents. Are you depressed? Do you ever feel down, fatigued or unmotivated? Ask your doctor about it – you might be depressed. And the good news is, we have a convenient little pill for that… No really – ask your doctor. In fact, call him right now!

And, in this culture, a lot of people are depressed. Doesn’t this say something about the culture we live in? I could go into the reasons for that, but that would be a loooong discussion…

Then, there are the doctors. Is it really right that many drug companies, in effect, give a “commission” to the doctors for every prescription that they write? (Thus, the omnipresence of Prozac several years ago.) For many doctors, this puts them in a similar position as a used car salesman. Sure, they’re going to push this or that drug – they’re getting paid to. Whether or not one really needs the drug is another story entirely.

And of course, there is the ubiquitous presence of prescription drugs available on-line. Anything you want – there it is. Just click here and we’ll send you anything your little heart desires.

Is it any wonder that prescription drug addiction and abuse is epidemic in this culture right now? It is so easy for someone to become hooked on a drug, especially when it is easier and easier to have access to that drug. All at a price, of course.

Often, it starts out innocently enough. Someone is legitimately prescribed, say, a pain killer for a temporary physical problem that they have at that time. However, after months of taking that drug, they find that quitting just isn’t as easy as one might think. And of course it isn’t – most of these things are addictive – it’s part of their nature.

The irony of pain killer withdrawal is that it hurts. As soon as the substance is removed from the body, the addicted person really does experience pain, sometimes quite severely. Of course they want their pain killer back – they’re in pain.

The sheer amounts that some people take of these drugs is staggering – thirty, forty, more than a hundred pills a day. Often, this leads to accidental overdoses, either from one drug taken in too high a quantity, or from mixing several substances together, not realizing that substance A and substance B should never be taken at the same time. When one is picking and choosing one’s drugs without the advice of a pharmacist (doctors often are not particularly well educated about the chemical effects of mixing drugs), it is a recipe for disaster.

There is also the trick of getting prescriptions from multiple sources – one from the general practitioner, on from the dentist, one from the osteopath, etc. Add to that the bevy of drugs available on-line and it is easy to see how one can become a factory of chemicals.

I recently read a very good book called Cracked, which was from the point of view of a doctor working in a drug rehabilitation unit in California. Once someone is truly addicted to a substance, it really isn’t as easy as “oh, why don’t they just quit.” Addiction is a process of the limbic system, the lizard brain if you will. Taking away a substance to which one is addicted throws that system into a frenzy – as far as the brain is concerned, the organism is in immediate and terrible peril. If it doesn’t have that substance, it is going to die. No amount of rational thought can change this conviction – it is a hard-wired survival mechanism lodged deep inside the brain.

We live in a culture of addiction – it is, in fact, encouraged. Nicotine and caffeine were accepted and actively marketed many decades ago because they supposedly increased productivity on the job, thus the reason that most businesses still hand out free coffee to all of its employees. Never mind the health risks of these substances – Papa America needs a new pair of shoes.

These days, even small children are put on drugs to control their behavior and moods. ADHD is the new hip disease – everybody’s got it and everybody must be medicated.

There was a recent study conducted to determine eating habits of children age four to twenty-four months. The study showed that most children, by the time they’re two, are eating french fries as their only vegetable and have a sugary dessert every day. And, by the time infants are seven months old, many of them are being fed caffeinated soft drinks in their bottles.

Hmm… small child with a whole lot of energy + caffeine + sugar + not being allowed to play outside and run off some energy = this child must be hyper-active. OF COURSE THE CHILD IS HYPER-ACTIVE – it’s a child. They are by nature very active, and now they’re pumped full of stimulants. Duh.

But, rather than change the child’s diet, or let him play outside as much as he likes, it is easier to just put the child on a drug to calm his ass down so that he will sit quietly in front of the television and eat his french fries and drink his Coke.

And television certainly doesn’t do anything to promote extended periods of concentration or focus. Everything is presented in little ten minute portions with glitzy, flashy commercials thrown in between. (Um, yummy – wouldn’t you like some french fries and a Coke?) The images in the programming itself are often frenetic and highly active, which is what holds the child’s attention in the first place. For many children, this is their primary caregiver, the template after which they model their behavior.

Is it any wonder that they have a hard time sitting still for hours in institutional learning facilities? Further on in the aforementioned study, it was noted that a person’s eating habits are pretty well established by the time they are two or three years old. Is it then any wonder that the rate of obesity has doubled from 1 in 10 Americans to 1 in 5 Americans since 1984? Is it any wonder that millions of people in our culture eventually have heart conditions, hypertension and high blood pressure?

But never fear – there are drugs for all of that! In our culture, there is little to no interest in preventing or curing disease – there is no money in that. Rather, we are interested in maintaining disease, usually by the use of expensive prescription drugs.

Another interesting tidbit about drug development and marketing in this culture… Before a drug can be tested and developed, it is required that the company interested in producing it run a marketing profile to see how many people will want to buy it. If the proposed drug would treat, say, depression, then it is very likely that it will be approved for development since so many people in this culture suffer from depression.

Now, if the proposed drug would cure AIDS, then it is much less likely to be developed. Although AIDS is at epidemic proportions world-wide, the largest segment of the population effected are poor people in third-world countries who cannot shell out millions of dollars for treatment. So, that drug will probably be shelved in order for yet another drug to be developed that will induce rock-hard erections for twelve hours at a time.

I do not believe that there is any grand conspiracy at play in these dynamics, but rather that this is just another case of capitalism gone mad. There is nothing wrong with money in and of itself, but often it seems to take such precedence above all other human concerns. And of course, the more drugged up we are as a society, the easier all of this is for us to swallow. (Pun intended.)

It is interesting to me to look at which drugs are endorsed in this culture and which ones are not. It seems that drugs which are designed to make one “more productive” are encouraged, while the others are not. Whether that be drugs to pep one up or calm one down, the ones endorsed all lead to behaviors which lead to some level of “functioning” within the framework of what society deems acceptable and productive. If the drug is recreational or causes one to look at the world and society in a different light, then that drug is not acceptable and almost always illegal.

Good drugs versus bad drugs… it just makes me wonder. It seems odd to me that some drugs are encouraged while others are not, unless I look at the real roots of drug use in this culture. It has nothing to do with health or what is “good” for people – it has to do with making money. If a drug encourages you to make more money for the society, then it is good. If it does not, then it is bad.

Alcohol would seem to be the exception to this, since it does nothing to promote productivity. However, the companies that manufacture alcohol (as well as cigarettes) have a large enough corporate voice to make sure that it stays on the market nevertheless. It creates jobs!

In many ways, I feel that I have been pretty lucky. I’ve always had a suspicion and avoidance of prescription drugs, largely because my mother was a nurse. If she didn’t trust them and wouldn’t take them, it gave me pause to wonder. Add to that that the few times I had reason (and desperation enough to try them) to take pain killers, I hated them. I hated how I felt, and really it didn’t do much for the pain any way – it just made me care less about it. Tried it, didn’t work, didn’t try it again.

I’ve had my share of endorsed and non-endorsed drugs in my life, though with all but one, they were always very easy for me to set aside when I decided that I was done with them. Unless it’s true that poppy seeds really would cause one to not pass a drug test (I was on a lemon poppy seed muffin kick last week), then there is not and has not been anything illicit in my system for quite some time. However, not everyone has such an easy time of it.

The only drug I have ever had to struggle with is nicotine. In a way, this has been a good learning experience for me. Sometimes I think that my struggles with it were karmically induced… I remember when I was sixteen or seventeen and watched Sid and Nancy for the first time. I thought “well, if that was me, I’d just quit. What could be so difficult about it?” Now I know. Because of that, I can’t possibly sit in judgement of people who “get hooked” on something and can’t let go of it, because I’ve been there myself. Sure, what I was doing was a bit more culturally endorsed than heroine, but the principles and chemistry are essentially the same.

There are so many reasons that people use and abuse drugs in our culture, and really if you step back a few paces and look at it, it is largely a product of the attitudes and problems in our society. Some drugs are legal, some are illegal; some drugs are culturally endorsed, some are not. The results, however, are rarely (if ever) ultimately healthy either for the individual or society, yet they remain. Why is that?

In a chapter in The Third Chimpanzee, the author postulates that drug use is a maladaptive derivative of a common mating practice among many animals. Namely, some animals display risk-taking behavior during mating rituals (usually the male) as a way of saying “hey – my genes are so good that I can risk my life and still come out on top.” He suggests that the corespondent human behavior is linked to this trait.

But I don’t know… I think that it has more to do with the problems in our world from which many of us try, in one way or another, to escape. When there is no escape, animals will, instinctively, turn to self-destructive behavior. (A common example of this is the wolf chewing off its leg when it is caught in a trap.) I do not believe that human beings are inherently stupid or lazy, though I do believe that they are easily misled and socialized into having misplaced trust in certain institutions.

Human societies seem to me like a huge animal with no head, no consciousness, no thought past the end of its nose. It runs on with its head to the ground searching for whatever sustenance it feels it needs to survive for that day without a single thought for the day after that. It never stops, holds up its head and looks around, wondering if perhaps there isn’t a better way to go about doing things. This particular animal is largely run these days by corporate concerns – always sniffing out the next buck, the next million, the next way to feed its insatiable appetite. Does this animal care about you or me? Of course not. But we are a part of it – we, in fact, exert quite a bit of control over its future and where it chooses to go next.

At the end of this discussion, I’m left with the question that my grandmother so pointedly asked me last night…. So, what are we going to do about it?