You turn on a show to decompress, forget your worries, and pretend away the soul-crushing despair that this particular chapter of your life has inflicted upon you. So why is your sweet relief interspersed with people telling you about medicines for horrific medical afflictions with side-effects that also convince you that you’re already dying?
It’s not the place of SomeGuyWrites.com to tell you that Big Pharma shouldn’t be able to advertise directly to consumers, thereby bumming us out constantly while we Americans are seeking some minor relief from the injury of selling the bulk of our lives wholesale for scraps on the labor market. Questions like the constitutionality of such advertisement as defined by Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council pertain to an assessment like that. And this isn’t ThatOneGuyWhoPracticesConstitutinalLawWrites.com — though, believe it or not, that domain was also available on the cheap. I don’t know the first thing about law (which is, presumably, how to wink seductively at prospective jurors). But I also don’t care. I’ll say it plain, and I’ll even put it in boldface a second time around. A willingness to make bold, mostly-uninformed pronouncements is this blog’s raison d'être. Big Pharma shouldn’t be able to advertise directly to consumers.
Has this ever happened to you?
Work is stressful. You might lose that big account with that client with the stupid name — let’s call them Itscrap.com — because they saddled you with a request that’s almost designed for your failure. Or, you’re bleeding sweat and tears for a supervisor who just can’t seem to warm to all your most normally infectious nervous ticks. Or, you have presciently predicted the inevitable futility of human labor due to machine learning and advanced robotics, and just can’t feel motivated to slave away so that other people can get ahead leaving you eventually to a dystopian slum in which you live in a car that’s stacked atop, and beneath, another car..
All the same, you can’t lose this job.. All you know is that the better you seem to do professionally, the more you have seemed to tread water financially. And the job market is cut-throat in a way it never seemed before ‘09 (back when even people with bachelors in the humanities were employable). And you don’t really have any savings to speak of. But don’t worry: it’s past EOD and you’re home for the day. Let the worries of your work life drift away. Home sweet…
Not so fast! Stress gremlins, as we all know, hide away in your work clothes as a trick to accompany you home. And, besides their threat of acute dermatitis, they can also escape into your sanctuary and fill you with all the dread of eventual termination and homelessness that normally pervades your working hours. There’s only one surefire way to scare them off. Turn on your favorite sitcom.
Bliss in the form or familiar friends and well-worn laughs envelopes you like the womb. What work? What impending failure that might torpedo the very foundations of your life? Haven’t I always lived in the intricate fantasy of this affordable Manhattan two-bedroom that I mysteriously pay for? But what’s this disease, now? And why do I want to ask my doctor whether Urfuctatril with Formunthstolive is right for me when it might cause me to bleed out through my anus as a side effect?
I don’t need to tell you, fellow work drone who can’t even risk a week of vacation without losing your livelihood to a younger work drone with slightly less to lose: we can’t afford, psychically speaking, to be fucked both coming and going. Something has got to give. But in an age when corporations are people and we have become expensive stand-ins for the machines that will soon replace us, what say have we in the matter?
Well, I say to you, drone 000000800b: I didn’t make the subject of this post “a call to action” for nothing. We have but one option. Stand as one, and make clear to Big Pharma that we will not ask our doctors about Urfuctatril with Formunthstolive. Does that frighten you? It shouldn’t. We’ve all seen enough cancer-survivor stories on Ellen, or wherever they’re aired, to know that, on that fateful day when the doctor tells you that you’ve lost your right as an American to fool yourself into believing that you’ll live forever, you’ll instantly become one of those mission-driven super-researchers out of the movies. You’ll be too busy on pages-long message boards deciding between which of the treatments that Mexico, Canada, and Switzerland allow that the FDA “still has concerns about” to ever remember that you once saw an ad that mentioned your disease when you were too stressed out by Itscrap.com to care about it.
Tell the lobbyists for Big Pharma (such as, and) that we’ll never pay attention to their ads, that they don’t matter, and that they’re a waste of money.
We’re already selling our lives away. The least they can do is leave us our peace of mind until that moment when we have to panic and go bankrupt paying them for a slim chance of staying alive. Who’s with me?