I feel alive
by Matt Worley
Some friends of mine decided to become pharmacists, rather than actual doctors, in college. The reasons were two-fold. One, pharmacy school takes about five years to complete (rather than the at least 8 plus residency of medical school)--barring any unforeseen diversions along the long road of post-high school. Two, the jobs paid well and there was no cutting of human flesh involved. Smart people aren't always of the strongest of stomachs. So now these friends (who I have mostly lost contact with) are most likely getting a pretty good wage counting out pills at a Walgreen's, Wal-Mart or some other pill dispensing depository.
I didn't realize how hot pharmacy would be now. Not that I wanted to endure that many Chemistry classes (I've never had an interest in putting compounds together to make other compounds--at least in a chemical sense), but there sure are a lot of miracle cures coming out today. And for the first few years, they'll keep pharmacists busy--before the drugs go non-prescription.
The newest and biggest pill around is Viagra. In less than two months, this bad boy of the new school of medicine (the one that teaches people are not only supposed to be healthy, but happy as well) has torn up the charts of American pharmacy. For around $9 a pop, impotence can be cured. Of course, in a few years, the wives of these newly potent men might be asking for a miracle drug of their own: the "get that thing out of my face while I'm working" pill.
But no matter, by then Viagra will be available near the condom section of every convenience store. Newly non-prescription and ready for the big time. Like aspirin before, it will be the new "must have" for medicine cabinets.
Every time a new miracle drug comes out, a movie pops into my mind. A mostly scorned film called "Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy." The premise is simple. A group of scientists working for a large pharmaceutical firm are researching a cure for depression. They think they've got a breakthrough, and to keep the money rolling in for research, they forgo extensive testing and release the pill. The pill works and sells wonderfully for a while (in the pill's first month, it beats penicillin sales--the former king of medicinal treatments). And then the side-effects start to happen.
It's a funny movie. It's a mean movie. And it addresses a lot of things most movies wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. The traps of money, fame, business, social order and structure, and one simple fact: we're not supposed to be happy all the time. If we're happy all the time, we won't even know we're happy anymore. Everything will be up and then up won't matter. Being happy will be like going to work. Nothing necessarily bad, merely different.
What if getting a paycheck were just as exciting as buying a meal at McDonald's? What if finding a long lost love was just as thrilling as seeing the new episode of "Friends"? If everything is evened out with a medicinal iron, we'll all look really pretty, but we'll be floating around like zombies wondering why we're so complacent all the time.
One more example before I go. It's something I usually point out on Saturday nights after midnight while I'm into my third or fourth beer. Remember back before you were 21? Remember how much fun it was to get drunk? There were hassles, of course. We had to find someone over 21 to buy (this usually took an hour or so), go to wherever they were, drive them to a liquor or grocery store and give them a tip for their trouble.
But getting drunk was an event. Planning was involved and the experience was dynamically different from the rest of life. And those little moments of happiness as the drunk set in, those were the places we wanted to go. Of course, we overdid it all the time. Speeding past the "getting drunk" into the "so drunk I need to lean on something" stage, and finally puking out the poison in a effort to feel a little better before swimming to sleep in bed.
And now I wonder as I drink that third or fourth beer if I'll ever find that little moment of drunken happiness again. But I guess it doesn't matter cause I can take my little pill and remember the glory days when true happiness actually existed. When happiness was found in real things, rather than a simulated happy world projected by my chemical intake.
Matt Worley finds it interesting no one has taken the time to investigate whether skyrocketing Viagra sales have anything to do with the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
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