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DRUG DEFICIENCY SYNDROME
by Ronni Sandroff

"If we've got the drug, you've got the disease," is the premise behind a lot of patient education material these days. I should know. I write a lot of the stuff.

Who ever heard of osteoporosis until the drug industry started giving big grants to non-profit associations to publicize the disease (and jack up prescription sales)? Mild depression was considered a normal response to life in these United States until the folks who brought you Prozac and its relatives started funding snazzy videos for consumers and diagnostic tools for doctors.

To show you how this plays, imagine that marijuana was a newly invented, FDA-approved pharmaceutical product. We'd soon have:

• TV ads inquiring: Do you work too hard? Has rock 'n' roll lost its thrill? Do you cut your hair too much? These are signs of Mellowness-Deficiency Disease (MDD), a leading cause of divorce. Ask your doctor about a new medication.
• Tax-deductible public service announcements on the plight of those with "Inability To Chill," (ITCh) narrated by Cheech and Chong ("I moved to California to save my marriage, but it didn't help! But then I found marij-well.")
• A mellowness index, to screen people with Excess Motivation (among executives, EM has been linked to Wetlands-Paving Compulsion) developed with federally funded research and administered by primary care physicians.
• Special forums in medical journal supplements (paid multipage ads that look a lot like other journal articles) in which big-name doctors advise their colleagues on treatment issues: Are men less mellow than women? What can we do for the patient who cannot inhale? If the patient is still unchilled after weeks of treatment, should s/he be moved on to Ecstasy? Ritalin?

Related Links:
(1) Medical Lobby for Appropriate Marketing
Check their homepage, too. Powerful influence. http://www.camtech.net.au/malam/HMIHC/market/marketin.htm

(2) See both "antidepressives" and "cannabis" at: http://www.drugtext.org/sub/sub.htm

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WHO IS: Ronni Sandroff writes on health and medicine for consumer magazines and pharmaceutical companies