Sleepfucking and Suicidal Thoughts: Drug Side Effects

Coming home from CVS with my shopping bag full of meds for a double ear infection, I realized the magic is gone from the prescription bottle. Remember the good old days when prescriptions got all the little warning stickers lined up on the side? The jolly, candy-like colors reminding us to take it with food, or to remember it only goes up our ass.

It was easier to get a sense of the strength of the drug in the old days: the more stickers on the bottle, the harder-core it had to be. If you had 4 or 5 stickers, it was a big fuckin’ deal.

These days, they’re reduced to a few soulless lines on the bottle, and a 7,600 word dissertation printed up and stapled to the bag. Every drug is a big deal. You have to read the first four chapters of War and Peace to see if taking it with orange juice will kill you. But I miss the stickers and wonder what they’d be like with today’s medications.

Modern Prescription Stickers

With the ridiculous number of medications in the market, just about every side effect is now fair game. While it may make sense to call your doctor if things go bad, pharmacists probably think there are some thing you may ignore (toenails falling off, for example) versus things that really really matter:

In the old days, you didn’t have stuff at the pharmacy that would give you TB or herpes or cancer as a side effect — the old school stuff would just kill you outright. These days, you have to be more direct, more honest, about the side-effects that commonly occur with new drugs that fix just about everything. If hair is going to start growing on your eyelids, you need to know. If you’re going to constipate like a cement mixer, better be prepared.

But how explicit is explicit? If ‘Rectal Use Only’ was a little racy for 1972, what is ‘going too far’ in 2011? With medicine so much more personal nothing is off limits. More than half all the commercials you’ll see while you watch the Mets blow it tonight will be for a pill. If we are expected to Have a Happy Period, then we can have notice like this, and you couldn’t say you weren’t warned:

Truth in packaging, that’s all I’m after.

Psychopharmacology For $800, Alex

The dizzying array of antidepressants and the like has given rise to a bunch of bad side-effects. It isn’t just a headache anymore. People are listless, shaky, seizing, sleeping, swearing, sweating and constipating on these magic pills. And there’s always the chance you get the one that’s just not for you. It’s tempting to try to have just one sticker cover it all.

Oddly, the  guys down in the Legal department thought it was too vague. They think ‘batshit’ is a bit of a wiggle word, and it could mean so many things. Muttering? Raving? Ranting? Compulsive nail biting? Lawn dart fetishes? Vegisexuality?

“So let’s stick with what we know,” they said, “and get back to basics.” Thus they came up with:

Well, that’s what you get with the boys in legal — they were ‘exempt’ from the sensitivity training they mandated for the rest of the firm.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t just be honest and accurate. Take the proposal for the 2011 Sleep Aid sticker, the label for Sonatas and  Lunesta, and that one with Abe Lincoln and the beaver. After having popped a couple Ambien to wake up with fridge full of food I don’t remember buying, this seems to hit the mark:

Yes, sleepfucking as a side-effect. Ain’t medicine great? Utterly plausible explanation for just about any nefarious bender imaginable. And as far as society goes, face it, with social media and security cameras and spyware on our PCs, all of our junk is hanging out anyway, whether we remember it or not.  And if it’s doing so limply, maybe somebody should have warned us:

Of course, this little gem covers both cases: who in particular may not desire it? If you suddenly need to do it 5 times a day, your better half may have the problem.  And, of course, if your ability is affected, we’ve had the cure for that for some time. And some side-effects…

It’s one of those counterintuitive warnings…too much of a good thing may well break your junk forever.

But such is the pharmacopoeia these days. We’re way beyond ‘Take with plenty of water.’