Chris Rock's brilliant stand-up routine includes some riffs on the ubiquitous television drug commercials that "keep naming symptoms till they get one" that the viewer has.
Even if the ads don't mention what it is the medicine is supposed to do: "You see a lady on a horse or a man in a tub, and they just keep naming symptoms: 'Are you depressed?' 'Are you lonely?' 'Do your teeth hurt?'" Even "'Do you go to bed at night and wake up in the morning?' They got that one!" he adds. "I got that. I'm sick. I need that pill!"
The New York Times quotes Chris Rock as part of its review of Greg Critser's new book, Generation RX. This book examines how baby boomers and their offspring have become the most medicated generations in history, taking pills that promise to "do everything from guarding us against our excesses of drink, food and tobacco, to increasing our children's performance at school, to jump-starting our own productivity at work, to extending our very time on this mortal coil."
Critser traces the massive growth of drugs claiming to do everything to the loosening and speeding up of the regulatory processes that used to keep the big pharmaceutical companies in check.
As an onslaught of money and lobbyists has made the government increasingly willing to do the bidding of drug companies, and doctors are similarly besieged with advertising, the barriers between Big Pharma and the public have grown thin and porous.
