Are the young afraid for their future?

I visited my local Costco yesterday and thought to speak with the pharmacist. I wanted to get an idea about how drugged the American public is.

I found the following –

1   The number of prescriptions increase until people reach about 60, and then level off. Each person has 17 prescriptions on average by age 50,  and takes over 1,300 tablets a year!

2  Men tend to ignore physicians advice and don’t fill their prescriptions as much, when compared to women.

3  Most of the prescriptions for people in their 20’s and 30’s are for anti-depressant drugs, far more than older Americans.

This is what I thought after the conversation…

1   The drug business is fantastically successful. They have conned both the public who watch the fluffy TV commercials of people smiling while dancing in fields, and the doctors that taking drugs is good and that there is a pill for everything.

The drugs are good message is on TV every day. A lie spoken frequently enough becomes the truth, and then conventional wisdom.

In other words, “take your meds” is the new nornal especially as the list of conditions “requiring” medication has greatly expanded. That’s especially true if you have young children, and you can be convinced that they need them. Start them off properly with Ritalin or similar in the methylphenidate family and they’ll have a lifetime legal habit.

2   Men may think that they are immortal, so don’t actually need the called-in prescriptions and don’t pick them up. They may think that they are too expensive even with insurance, doubt the physician’s credibility or other reasons that wasn’t touched on during my conversation.

Once you reach sixty, you realize that immortality  is reserved for fantasy novels.

Apparently either women trust their physicians more, or actually believe that a panoply of drugs do something other than make the drug companies very rich.

3   Young Americans are not depressed because they are lost, but because they see our nation’s future. It’s bleak. Most don’t go down the illicit drug route, but are prescribed legal drug candy by their physicians. It’s the Soma of Aldous Huxley’s novel.

A sad story. What’s happened to my America? If I have anything to do about it, we aren’t doomed. We just need to be fixed. That will be my job, if elected next year.