ALTERING DRUG FORMULAS CONJURES SCARY VISIONS

Tie Rod fears that he is turning back into a stem cell, with no direction.
His is a serious case of being in horse latitudes, with no wind in his
sails and no current. He always wanted to be somebody but never got
specific enough. He spent $100 to get that $300 million, and got one number
right.

If he had won the PowerBall, Tie Rod was going to reopen the Esco Hankins
Record Shop and keep farming until the rest of the money was gone.

Tie Rod's dead brother's boy, the one they call "Highway," robbed a
dog pound to get OxyContin money, so at first Tie Rod was real happy
when the drug company announced that they could rig up those pills so
that they wouldn't go off when crushed.

That sounds like a good idea until you get to thinking about
it.

What if they did his Viagra that way, fixing it so wouldn't work if he
was with the women he and Highway picked up at the Hillbilly Hogpen
after his divorce? Those pills take an hour to kick in, so a fellow
has to go somewhere where he can make out in an hour, or he might have
to go to the emergency room. He takes one at the house, flies down and
dances to Proud Mary and Old Time Rock n' Roll, and that leaves him
about 15 minutes to get a woman to the parking lot.

So what if they chemically altered that stuff so that it stiffened
one's resolve only with a woman you were married to? What would Bob
Dole do about that?

If they could do that, they could fix moonshine to where it would turn
into yuppie white wine on its third trip down the throat of a mandolin
picker. That is what President Bush would call a genuine moral hazard,
and Tie Rod could just imagine Sen. Hillary Clinton (Hall Monitor,
U.S. Senate) passing a law about it.

Will they rig up cars so they won't start if the payments are behind?
Will Kraft Extra Sharp cheddar cheese turn into Cheez Whiz or brie if
anybody over 200 pounds bites into it after 10 p.m.? Stringbean sang
about science being baffled, but now science is doing the baffling.

Tie Rod says that it sounds like stem cells are just parts of the body
that have never amounted to anything, so he is afraid that science
will snatch his whole body up and change him into Christopher Reeve.

Besides, all those people dying from OxyContin abuse would have found
something else, like people always have, whether it be rabbit tobacco,
horseweed or lye soap.

He says that the drug dealers in the mountains are just the newest
versions of herb doctors and that all nations need their shamans.

They arrested those two doctors in Paintsville for being absolute
wizards at giving out pills, but Tie Rod says that if he remembers
right, Bore and Gush debated over who could do that the best and the
most. He says those doctors should have been named secretary of health.

The government complains that those doctors saw patients for only
three minutes, which is more time than he got from the Lexington
doctors hired by the insurance companies to testify he wasn't
disabled. And it is, in fact, more time than he ever got with his
regular doctors, and when he leaves them, he doesn't even feel any
better.