The Drugs Don’t Work

So many pills!

Before anyone calls the “five-o” on me (that’s code for “police”, in case you didn’t know), or suspects my sobriety as a front put on to hide my true Winehouse colours, rest assured, I’m talking strictly Boots-bought stuff. Paracetamol, Lemsip, Tums, that kind of drug.

Maybe it’s the hangover from my recently heightened awareness of the meagreness of my own existence, or else too much caffeine, but this week has seen a sharp increase in headaches. Literally speaking. Yet, in a curious twist, this week sees me not quitting popping a sugar-coated cure but quite the opposite.

Let me explain. Although being of a delicate constitution myself, since childhood I have always refused taking any kind of self-medication if I could avoid it. Of course, when I caught the mumps two summers ago, I demanded all the codine I could get. But any less than a diagnosed ailment and I just don’t see the point.

I know it's strange, but then, so is forcing down something to shut up the symptoms that your body sends out to tell you that something is wrong. This may all spring from a twenty-year hatred of orange Calpol, but it’s just me. I don’t expect you to understand, 'cause I don’t myself, but there it is.

So, going against my beliefs and inexplicable peculiarity, I began chomping down on chalky, bitter-tasting white pills when the pain just passed over to the other side of bearable. And you know what, I couldn’t for the life of me feel any difference. After a couple of hours of numbness, not recovery, the pain seeped back into my pressure points and took over my skull again.

Now usually I would think this a pretty banal issue, it has to be said, but health is big business these days, and pharmaceuticals no less so. If you thought they just stopped at pills you’ve been severely duped my friend. In fact, the same company who claims to relieve colon ulcers with one product also produces highly moreish salty crisps, packaged with an obscenely smiley moustached face encouraging you to gorge yourself on them, and should you experience the inevitable repercussions (and you will) it doesn’t matter because conveniently enough there is a pill you can buy from, oh look, the same company to make it all go away.

Once you pop, you can’t stop indeed.

Of course, non/prescription drugs do actually help a lot of people in chronic pain, I get that and that’s a beautiful thing, truly it is. Anything good is going to get abused, or soiled. The only thing worse than these shockingly irresponsible companies are "religious institutions" who claim that women should give birth drug-free, and to manage any consequent depression in the same way. A bunch of fat white men who believe in aliens telling women what to do with their bodies - now I would pay someone to make a pill to cure that. If it included poison, all the better…

What I’m not so hot on is what these types of quick-fix promises in colourful casings mean for the rest of us; what they say of how we approach our lives and our world. It seems we would rather spend money on getting rid of the effects, than time on seeing to the causes of our problems.

Yet, I guess it's no wonder we do. Hell, when a fascist political party can win even one vote, or a teacher can be driven to bulimia (and death) because of bullying in the workplace, a couple of quaffable placebos look more than tempting, if hardly adequate enough. That’s like taking aspirin to get rid of a terminal disease.

In fact, it is enough to drive one to the hard stuff.

Ok, so a chill pill once in a while wouldn’t kill me, but then, it wouldn’t make me feel much better either. If it existed. Which it doesn’t.

You know what: stuff that. If my mum could give me life without an epidural (which she did, but not under the influence of Tom Cruise or any of his ilk, but because of “that bitch of a mid-wife”, as she reminds me of on my birthday, every birthday), then I can suffer through my mild migraines without any candy-sized remedy, damn it.

And tic tacs don’t count, because although they look like pills they’re not, and they do cure something: unfresh breath. Ping!

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