DRUG ADVERTISING BUG GET YOU?

Drug advertising comes on all of the time now, a persistent flow of ‘you’ll feel better if you take our pill.’

One second you’re watching the Oregon Ducks closing out the Iowa Hawkeyes at the 70,000 seat Kinnick Stadium, named after Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick, and the next you’re watching a lovely family picnic scene played out beside a lake or a river with one person in the picture a ticking time bomb.

Unless they take that pill.

I try to remember pill history, the one where a lab is tasked with developing a remedy for a specific problem.

In the not so distant past, home remedies were the norm. You only went to the doctor if you were half dead, or had a bone sticking out of your skin.

It was a time of measles for all kids, the sooner the better, and chicken pox parties.

Those were the times when the parents of baby boomers ruled the world, the giants of the greatest generation, the silent generation, who grew up during the depression and WWII, where they learned how to get things done.

After that came the time of baby boomers in a baby boomer world.

Not everyone is doing their happy dance to this tune.

(Looking at millennials.)

 

Baby Boomer Drugs

The astute millennial population is aware of the baby boomer drugs of the 1960’s, booze, weed, hash, the reds, the whites, cocaine, acid, mescaline,  morphine, and heroin.

What am I missing?

Grace Slick had this to say:

 

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all

 

Mother gives you a pill that doesn’t do anything at all?

Like what, a vitamin?

Who gets high on vitamins?

They might boost your immune system, but you’re doing just fine.

 

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low

 

This is a flashback clip of the Jefferson Airplane.

Be careful, you might get a little dizzy, but it will ‘feed your mind’ for sure.

I was twelve years old in 1967 when the song came out.

Everyone in that era had already aged out for me.

Besides, I was a fan of the ageless Elvis more than groovy hippies.

What did I know?

 

The Drug Advertising Closer

Today the Sixties are all nostalgia about idealistic young people, blissful stoners, and taking it to The Man, speaking back to power.

It’s all nostalgia except for one part.

Unlike the era of dinosaurs roaming the land before falling dead in mass extinction events, then covered in silt and dirt that turned to rock hiding their bones for millions and millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, the dinosaurs of the sixties, the relics of another era, are still among us.

You might be one of them, Moonbeam. Or you, Star Light.

Whoever you are, and whatever your tribe name had been, if you are boomer vintage, these drug ads are aimed at you.

This isn’t the lab presenting data for you to digest, hoping you understand the benefits. Oh no, not that.

Too boring.

Instead, it’s mainstream story tellers tugging at the heartstrings like Jimi playing Voodoo Child.

 

You don’t want to miss Johnny’s soccer game, kindergarten graduation, medal ceremonies, any of it.

Do you?

Not everyone is trying to make up for being absent parents to their own kids by going overboard as grandparents, but you’d never know.

The advertising wizards know. They know which buttons to push, and in what order.

“Ask your doctor about ________.”

Heads up, Boomers:

If your doctors don’t know about the drugs needed to make your life better, to improve your condition, then you need a new doctor.

It works both ways.

How many doctors out there want their patients to prescribe for themselves, then complain to the state board of examiners if you disagree with their self-diagnosis and medications from television commercials?

How many?

 

 

PS: My own Dad had quadruple bypass surgery plus one, which is quintuple, and at first I worried he might drop any minute.

PSS: He wasn’t’ worried at all when he moved to land five miles out from a supply town with one stop sign sitting fifty miles away from the most remedial medical care for someone with his health history.

And that my friends is how it is.

Don’t worry about it?