The Straight Dope

[Lightning Rod]

I don't want to write about this subject. I've spent too much time doing it. But the fact is that we are a drug saturated society. At the same time we contend that we are fighting a 'War on Drugs.' The hypocrisy of this is more than slightly evident.

The Centers for Disease Control last week reported that
More than 40 percent of the American population is taking at least one prescription drug, and one person in every six takes three or more. This is not counting OTC drugs.

You can't tune-in to the evening news without seeing a deluge of ads for antacids, allergy medicines and drugs to enhance your cock or other drugs called cox inhibitors. Go figure.

All our role models are either on drugs or strung out on plastic surgery. Some of them even have personal trainers.

Everybody knows that you can't be a championship athlete without being on steroids or some other performance enhancing drugs. Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle were infamous users of alcohol. Yet, this week, Senators such as John McCain and even the President himself are calling for regulation of drug use among baseball players.

The evening news is a veritable medicine chest. Within ten minutes you get commercials about Cialis or Viagra or Levitra (those are going to be the names of my back-up singers when I invent my rock and roll tour), which are definitely in the category of 'performance enhancing drugs,' and then a news story about an athlete who is using steroids or other 'performance enhancing' drugs and whether or not to kick him out of the Hall of Fame or take away his Olympic gold medals. It's madness.

If Pfizzer could get a patent on cocaine or marijuana, they would gladly sell it to you complete with ads on the evening news. But when the Afghanis want to grow poppies because they offer the best yield for a cash crop, it's a capital offense. This is hypocrisy of the highest order.

As usual, it's a money game. If Merck could get a patent on crack cocaine, there would be ads on Fox and ABC telling you what a thrill it was and how it was great for your health. There would be studies and surveys to support this contention. These 'studies' would be presented as news when they are really ads for a product that is being sold by a sibling subsidiary of the parent corporation.

If they can convince you that your nose is too snotty, or your dick is too limp, or that you aren't enjoying life like you should be, or that the reason why you can't concentrate on your job is because you have a disease related to alphabet soup, then they can sell you all manner of snake oil. Let's do a pre-emptive strike on heart disease or osteoporosis. How is your good cholesterol as compared to your bad cholesterol? Do you have incipient arthritis or can we meter your diabetes? Will our purple pill fit your decor?

It becomes a question of which drugs are approved and which drugs are not. Marijuana is bad and Vioxx is good....no, scratch Vioxx, we'll use Celebrex. No steroids if you're an athlete, but they are fine if you are an arthritic. Oxycontin is ok if you are Rush Limbaugh but heroin is forbidden to William Burroughs. If you have a doctor's prescription, you can get most any toxic substance you want, but if you rely on the black market you are damned to economic and legal suppression. There are no ads in the Yellow Pages for medical marijuana.

When I was a teenager I was a member of the same country club in Dallas where Mickey Mantle played golf. I played with him several times and knew his sons. Mickey's temper was legendary. It was not uncommon, on the Glenn Lakes fairways, to see one of Mickey's autographed three irons wrapped around a tree trunk. He was an angel on steroids. And now they are talking about showing Barry Bonds the door at the Hall of Fame and negating his records because he used performance enhancers. If Babe Ruth could have obtained a creme that he could have rubbed on his bat to make home runs, don't you think he would have used it?

The Poet's Eye sees that in the real world it's Balls to the Wall. Anything you can do to get the edge on your competition is legit. If there are drugs that will buy you home runs or gold medals at the expense of your health, you should be able to make that trade. If you can take a drug that will get you an A on a test or amp up your testosterone or straighten your member or keep you awake or make you sleepy or give you confidence or cause you not to care, it should be your decision whether or not to take it. I call it Body Sovereignty.

[Lightning Rod]

I think Mark Morford's column today is a good footnote to my piece

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 120804.DTL