Pubdate: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 Source: Calgary Herald (CN AB) Copyright: 2008 Calgary Herald Contact: http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/66 Author: Kevin Brooker NO MATTER THE KICK, DRUGS DON'T WORK Even amid the surreal screenplay of Super Bowl Sunday, one TV commercial stood out: the ad about the shady-looking drug dealer lurking around a phone booth behind an urban convenience store. "Business is off, sales are down," says the cartoonish reprobate. "Seems like half my customers don't even need me any more, you know. They get high for free out of their medicine cabinets. How am I supposed to compete with that?" A few days later, the message is reinforced in Calgary. Three West Dover children, in grades five and six, are observed to be lethargic and slurring their words. Turns out they copped some sleeping pills somewhere and thought it would be a good idea to experiment with them in social studies class. And so we are exposed to what is a dirty secret indeed: the widespread abuse of prescription medications for supposedly recreational purposes. What is astonishing to me, however, is just how secret this activity has always been as far as I can see. When it comes to popping goofballs for kicks, I appear to be way, way out of the loop. Thankfully, I had an unsuccessful start with what an old hippie buddy always referred to as "drug-store drugs." I clearly recall my mother dosing me with Aspirin when I was very young and plagued by severe earaches, but I remember just as well that I detected no pain diminishment. My lack of faith in pharmaceutical efficacy only increased as life went on. I did eventually become aware of the racy varieties of pills you read about in Hollywood biographies, like barbiturates, Valium and Percocet, but none of it sounded terribly appetizing. As a result, I never tried any of them, for fun or otherwise. Outside of a few rounds of tetracycline or maybe one or two Tylenol 3s, I'm a pharmacological virgin. What's more, so are my otherwise adventurous acquaintances. I have almost never heard any of them trumpeting the good times to be found in a gelatin capsule. Whereas people don't mind spinning yarns about the opium they smoked while trekking in Thailand, or earth-shaking mushroom trips deep in the Mayan jungle, I don't hear anybody mentioning their illicit dalliance with Oxycontin, a.k.a. hillbilly heroin. That's understandable, in a way. Pharmaceuticals are a hushed affair. On the street, dealers are expected to have tried and approved of the drugs they sell. In the doctor's office, leafing through the Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties, it's a different story. That bible of the legitimate drug industry is thicker than two Calgary phone books. Chances are the doctor is prescribing substances whose effects he has only read about. And he never says, "Try this, it's wicked." It should be noted the television commercial was produced by the White House of Drug Control Policy, a U.S. government entity, under the slogan, "Parents: The Anti-Drug." There is considerable irony to the implicit message that what is bad for kids is nonetheless OK for adults to possess by the cabinetful. Notice that when Heath Ledger died, there was enormous pressure to determine that it was indeed accidental. True, Ledger had mixed no fewer than six strong prescription drugs and likely in perilously high doses -- a spectacular miscalculation by a reputedly experienced drug-taker and a sign to me he had suicidal inclinations. Yet the innate lethality of those substances, either individually or in combination, appears to have escaped public discussion. It's like when you watch Scarface and the protagonist snorfles face-first into a mountain of cocaine. You automatically think, this isn't going to work out well for Tony Montana. Obviously, kids need to look at pill bottles in much the same apprehensive way. But so, too, do adults. "It's a good idea to avoid taking pills in front of kids," a spokesman for EMS warned Calgarians. "They mimic behaviour they see." Unless those goofballs aren't there to be stolen in the first place. Kevin Brooker is a Calgary writer. His column appears every Monday. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek