In his hilarious stand-up routine, Chris Rock talks about the ubiquitous television drug commercials that "keep naming symptoms till they get one that" the viewer's got. Sometimes, he says, the ads don't even tell you what the pill does: "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?"' He adds that one commercial he saw went, "Do you go to bed at night and wake up in the morning?"
"They got that one!" he says. "I got that. I'm sick. I need that pill!"
Rock's observations are almost too close to the actual truth to be considered satire, as Greg Critser's provocative new book, Generation RX, makes clear. Indeed, baby boomers and their offspring have become the most medicated
generation ever, devoted consu-mers from cradle to grave of every manner of pharmaceutical imaginable -- pills that not only cure real diseases, but that also promise, in Critser's words, 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."
Boomers, who grew up using drugs recreationally, have become a generation that lives almost full time in the Valley of the Dolls: bombarded by direct-to-consumer ads, they are happy to self-medicate, and their cost-conscious HMOs are happy to substitute antidepressants for expensive talk therapy, prescriptions for repeated doctor visits.
Little wonder, then, that drug use -- of the legal sort -- has soared. Americans routinely take pills for high cholesterol and high blood pressure, and they also routinely take pills to sleep, pills to focus, pills to chill and pills to perk up, pills for more sex and pills for less stress. Critser notes that "the average number of prescriptions per person, annually, in 1993 was seven," but had risen to 11 by 2000, and 12 last year.
"The total number of annual prescriptions in the United States now stands at about 3 billion," he writes. "The cost per year? About US$180 billion, headed to an estimated US$414 billion by 2011."He adds that spending on all forms of drugs to treat childhood and adolescent behavioral disorders rose by 77 percent between 2000 and 2003, "with 65 percent of all children on such drugs taking at least one antidepressant." On college campuses, the portion of students who went to health centers and "who were already taking psych meds went from 7 percent in 1992 to 18 percent in 2000."
There is little in Generation RX that hasn't been reported before -- in the flurry of articles about the pharmaceutical business, which appeared in the wake of the Vioxx recall last fall, or in the slew of recent books by experts like Marcia Angell (The Truth About the Drug Companies), Jerry Avorn (Powerful Medicines) and John Abramson (Overdosed America).
What Critser has done in these pages is synthesize a lot of
information and reserve it to the reader in an accessible, easily
digested form -- much as he did with information about obesity in his 2003 book, Fat Land. While his prose sometimes buckles from his efforts to be chatty and conversational -- at one point, he describes the liver, which can regenerate itself, as "a kind of Donald Trump of the human body" -- he does a lucid job conveying the dramatic ways in which the development and marketing of pharmaceuticals have changed over the last two decades and the equally dramatic and often disturbing consequences of this phenomenon.
RSS