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.