Our Daily Meds

In her book, "Our Daily Meds," Melody Petersen has given us a new understanding about what's behind prescription drug advertising on television. Money, that's what's behind prescription drug advertising on television. Who knew? In Big Pharma it's called direct-to-consumer marketing, and the official pharma jargon for this is DTC. Beyond that, however, nobody (including the Big Pharma companies themselves) really understands much of anything, because most of the money is only going into the pocket of the PR firms that create the drug ads. For the pharmaceutical companies, the DTC experiment has been a mixed bag.


Take the recent case of Dr. Robert Jarvik, hyping Lipitor umpteen times a day on the TV in scenes that depicted him rowing and running. Working through the New York PR firm of the Kaplan Thaler Group, Pfizer paid Jarvik $1.35 million to be the mouthpiece for Lipitor. What Kaplan Thaler failed to mention in the advertisement was that Jarvik was not a rowing devotee (they used a body double for that scene), and Jarvik was not a runner, and Jarvik was not even licensed to practice medicine. Under pressure from the U.S. Congress and the pharma blogosphere, Pfizer eventually pulled the ad from TV in February of 2008. Both Pfizer and Dr. Jarvik suffered a substantial loss of reputation. As for Kaplan Thaler, it wasn't necessarily a sure bet that they'd be working on another Pfizer DTC commercial, but now it seems that they're the firm behind the Lyrica ads.

DTC advertising is relatively new. The FDA first allowed these prescription medicine advertisements to be shown on television in early 1997, and the Big Pharma players jumped on the opportunity like Dobermans on a prime rib roast. The high point for this DTC activity was reached about three years ago. In July of 2005, Pfizer was one of the top ten advertisers on television (the U.S. military is number one). Starting in August of 2005, Pfizer began cutting back, but the recent Jarvik debacle didn't intensify that pullback. Quite the opposite. With the lion's share of the industry's 5.1 billion-dollar TV ad budget, Pfizer is now actually on track to surpass the high water mark for TV ad spending set in early 2005. Meanwhile, Merck has been virtually absent from DTC activity after being forced to pull the Dorothy Hamill ads for Vioxx.


One of the main points of contention in DTC advertising concerns the issue of "risk advisement." The warnings of adverse side effects that accompany DTC ads are not the least bit informative or understandable for the average TV viewer who might need the medicine. Meanwhile, the Big Pharma players and the PR firms like Kaplan Thaler are only concerned with "compliance," meaning that they do just enough full disclosure to keep the FDA from pulling the ad. For this reason, as well as a host of other reasons, the pharma industry is taking it on the chin from the blogosphere and the Congress and the AARP. According to several market research polls conducted in 2006 and 2007, the pharmaceutical industry, handgun manufacturers, and tobacco companies are all held in the same low esteem in the court of public opinion. Big Pharma, generally perceived as an obscenely prosperous cash-cow, actually posted a measly 3.8% increase in 2007, and is on track to an equally anemic performance in 2008. The last time that the pharmaceutical industry showed numbers like this was in 1961. One extremely well-placed pharmaceutical industry insider has gone on record saying that, in his opinion, at least one of the major Big Pharma companies will completely disavow the use of DTC advertising by the end of 2009. If advertising for prescription drugs could be summed up with two words, they would be, "unfulfilled promise."

The Elitist Candidate

Once again Barack Obama has been targeted for being an elitist. Those so-called hard-working, white voters certainly know a leadership deficiency when they see one. Too bad they weren’t around to sandbag the nominations of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR and JFK, for all of these presidents were unabashed elitists. Thomas Jefferson embraced scientific intellectual pursuits, spoke French, and had actually visited France. God forbid. The same was true for Ben Franklin who was also an elitist. All four of the faces on Mount Rushmore would be elitist icons if not for the fact that Abe Lincoln was born in a log cabin, and that he struggled with bi-polar depression all his life.


George W. Bush came from, perhaps, the noblest stock of all. Surrounded from birth by tremendous wealth and power, he could easily have slipped into elitism. However, wisely anticipating that he would one-day need to curry favor with hard-working white voters, he transformed himself at the earliest opportunity into a drunken frat boy, and then stayed at that performance level throughout his adult life right up to the present time. By forging an anti-intellectual, non-elitist skill set early on, he was able to put together a remarkable resume of business failures before starting his political career. Success came his way when Karl Rove entered the picture. Rove wisely understood that most Americans fail more than they succeed, and they would identify with candidate Bush based on the kindred qualities shared by all, just as long as Bush betrayed no hint of elitism or intellectualism. The sad thing (sad for the United States, not for Karl Rove) is that Rove had nailed the situation spot on. The result has been the last seven years.


Here’s the thing. If Americans won’t let themselves remember that all of our very best presidents were elitists, then there’s nothing in our democracy to keep us from electing one failure after another.

Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been a Cannibal?

Papua New Guinea attracts anthropologists the way that New York City attracts stockbrokers and theater wannabes. It’s where the action is, the place where human cultural evolution took a left turn and never looked back. The local name there for a helicopter is, “Food mixer from sky blong Jesus Christ.” It’s a dark tropical place, ancient and unknown, enchanting and deadly, pandering throughout time to an exotic people with their dreadful rituals of exquisite mystery and peculiarity that seem to roll on through the ages in seamless linkage to stone-age antiquity.

Like some anachronistic throwback to Amazon mythology, much of PNG is a matrilineal society with most of the land owned by women who pass it down in families from mother to daughter. In these places where women hold the only meaningful power, they staff most of the governmental positions and sell the betel nuts. Both functions seem to be equally important. The visitor there sees the shriveled old black-skinned crones selling coconuts and bananas as well as that peculiar local mood-altering combination of betel nuts, lime powder ground from coral, and leaves from the betel pepper plant, and the visitor never knows that the person who controls the betel nut supply controls the society.

The dark-skinned men mostly fish all day, after first stopping by the market to load up on their mood-enhancers, and loading up seems the only proper description for the process where betel nuts are chewed along with lime and betel pepper leaves in a mouth-filling intoxicant mix that stains the teeth and gums a bright vampire red.

Considering the second-class status of the males in the society, it becomes all the more astonishing when one first encounters the life-size wooden carvings of the male ancestor spirit figures in the Sepik River region to the north. These are nothing less than an artistic poke in the eye of matrilineal female authority, with their anatomically-correct male members exaggerated in length such that the standing totems achieve a kind of geometric triangular stability based on the principle of the three-legged stool. The elongated wooden genitals are one of the defining features of PNG statuary.

In 2000, my wife and I joined an anthropologist in PNG to investigate an episode of true cannibalism that had just taken place a month or two before we arrived there. We made a trip up into the mountains to get to know the people involved in that affair, and to try to understand it from their viewpoint. To our surprise, we were struck by the absence of anger and hostility in the whole affair. A group of women had killed an unfortunate chap, drained his blood, gutted him out, cooked him over an open fire, and then ate him. The poor chap whose misfortune was at the heart of this episode was old and feeble. That’s part of what made it all seem so Darwinian.

They spoke English, or at least a kind of Pidgin English that has been perpetuated in PNG out of necessity. It’s the only common language they have in Papua New Guinea. All the various tribes speak six-hundred different native languages. So before the missionaries came, people in one village could simply not communicate with people in another village only twenty kilometers away. As we interviewed these strange people, we came to realize that at no time, apparently, had any of these female cannibals lost their temper. It all just seemed so very natural the way they explained it, and because of that calm demeanor, we never felt threatened in any way. I came away with the strange belief that there is much more violence on American highways than what we found on that adventure in the high mountains of PNG.

Gay Marriage Triggers Loud Twang from John McCain

Last week, on May 17th, the California State Supreme Court overturned the state's ban on gay marriage, and the floodgates opened for same-sex unions. Ellen DeGeneres immediately announced her wedding plans, and actually asked John McCain to walk her down the aisle and give her away (I'm not making this up). That loud twang you heard was McCain's Republican underpants twisting into a rigid knot to guard his tight little sphincter. "Gay marriage" McCain believes, along with the religious Right, "Is an assault on the traditional family." Well, let's just see about that.

In today's America, 43% of all first marriages end in divorce. The failure rate for second marriages is 65%, and for those who believe that three strikes and you're out, they're right 75% of the time. Three quarters of all third marriages fail. When the numbers are aggregated, the divorce rate in America is 52%. It's the highest divorce rate for any nation or culture in the world by quite a wide margin. And the road to divorce can be cruel indeed, for public health statistics tell us that 17% of all wives suffer some level of spousal abuse.

It's no better for the children. Anybody who has taught in public school for more than 25 years will tell you, without exception, that students have diminished in their behavior, their work ethic, their respect for authority, and their overall learning ability. And this diminution has built upon itself incrementally, year by year, until American youth is now the most poorly educated in the industrialized world. The reason behind this decline is that fathers and mothers have abdicated their parental responsibility and left it up to the school system to tend to the upbringing of their children. Mothers no longer consider it a pleasure to dish up a hot meal for the kids, with the result that an astounding number of students get all three meals on weekdays from their school. And if parents are blessed with a high-energy child, they would prefer to medicate the kid with Ritalin rather than use good parenting skills to focus and develop the child's energy.

If one heterosexual marriage is good, evidently more is better, so we also have the American phenomenon of "plural marriage." Thanks to the recent shenanigans of the Mormon-offshoot polygamist sect in Texas, we have an insight into this freakish world. While exercising their religious faith, they begin turning their daughters into sex slaves at age 13 or 14, and for the next few years the young girls are bred like canine bitches in a puppy mill. They eventually grow up into clone-like women who appear on television as brain-dead Stepford wives. It ain't pretty, but it's, sure enough, heterosexual. And, of course, it's all rationalized with theological crapola.

The anti-gay Right wingers get a lot of their notions about marriage from the teachings of Jesus. Unfortunately, the guy left us with no personal example to guide us. He talked the good talk about "A man and wife cleaving to one another," but he was in no hurry to do much "cleaving" himself. His personal example was that of a man living an adult life in the company of other men.
So here's my question. When it comes to the debasement of traditional marriage, and the ruination of the American family, what can gay marriage possibly do that hasn't already been done?

Hard Working White Americans

As Barack Obama gets closer to locking up the nomination, it’s suddenly dawned on everyone that there is a certain segment of our society that will never vote for him, no matter what he says or does. And now Hillary Clinton has been kind enough to give us a tidy little euphemism to label these folks, and thereby avoid the dreaded “R’ word. They are, in Clintonspeak , “Hard-working white Americans.”

They might be hard-working now, but it’s worth noting that they are descended from people who were too lazy to pick their own cotton and tobacco.

Bird Flu and Racism

Threatened with rampant bird flu, Seoul, South Korea just became the latest Asian city to eradicate 100% of its chicken population. Meanwhile, on this side of the Pacific, Los Angeles is expanding its chicken population. Under a Tsunami wave of Mexican immigration that has made The City of Angeles look like a third-world metropolis, the city fathers were recently forced to change the law regarding house pets. Chickens are now considered house pets with no limit on their numbers, although roosters do have a cap. Evidently, a house full of chickens now has the cultural status once held by the Chihuahua.

You don’t need to be a virologist to visualize the possibility of a virulent H5N1 outbreak in the land of movie stars and sunshine. So here’s the question- If the time comes that it’s necessary to exterminate all the Hispanic cluckers- will this be labeled as an act of racism?

The Geopolitics of Denver

When they start welding the manhole covers in place to deny sewer access, you know that some kind of extravagant dog-and-pony show is coming to town. For Denver, the big attraction will be the Democratic National Convention in August, and this seems like a good time to explain why, politically, Denver is like a pinball caught between the machine’s two bottom flippers. It all has to do with the location, and the pinball flippers are the two neighboring towns.

Twenty miles west of Denver sits a town that is often referred to with tongue in cheek as The People’s Republic of Boulder. To say it is “liberal” is like saying that Washington D.C. is political or Vatican City is religious. The description, while true, is insufficient. Like utopian residents living inside the hole of a donut, surrounded by a growth-inhibiting greenbelt of protected wildlife sanctuary, the left-leaning citizens of Boulder go about their daily lives, listening to NPR, and motoring about in their low-carbon-footprint compact Volvos while avoiding all use of forbidden tobacco products. The Federal Government always keeps a close eye on the citizens lest they betray their insufficient level of patriotism by advocating for peace. And everybody in town knows that the NRA would have fewer members if guns were used to perform abortions.

Democrats, even those with a middle-of-the-road, it-doesn’t-make-any-difference view, will probably feel right at home in Boulder. There’s a semi-socialist comfort to be found in the normal Boulder leftist way of looking at things, and certainly life in this town, for liberals, is vastly superior to what it’s like down the road.

Down the road means Colorado Springs, 70 miles to the south. It’s a place where the citizens really know now to put the “Right” in righteous, and where seldom is heard the discouraging words, “gay marriage.“ Here is to be found an incestuous colony of world headquarters for outfits like The New Life Church, and The Navigators, and Global Harvest, and Focus On The Family, and numerous other para-church think-tanks devoted to the overthrow of evolution and homosexuality and stem-cell research and any other facets of biology which they find offensive. I never get it, that hang up with biology, since nowhere in the Gospels, as far as I can tell, is there anything to say from Jesus on the subject of biology. Nevertheless, the self-righteous biology police are famous for periodically calling a national news conference to announce that they’ve found homosexual traits in yet another animated cartoon character from the make-believe world of kiddie’s television. For me, watching this is more entertaining than Saturday Night Live, but the local citizens tend to keep their TVs glued to the Fox News Channel.

As home to the United States Air Force Academy, NORAD, the missile defense center, and the huge Ft. Carson army base, Colorado Springs is, arguably, the most militaristic city in America. Only a couple-dozen or so sovereign nations on earth have more firepower and military infrastructure than this single Colorado town, so the citizens of Colorado Springs tend to think of themselves as the last great bastion of patriotism and 2nd amendment protection. But deep down, if they’re forced to admit it, they also know that the NRA would have fewer members if guns were used to perform abortions.

Convention Democrats in August, intending to sneak down to Colorado Springs and, perhaps, revel in some pro-war happy-talk, are urged to go incognito. Don’t openly display your convention credentials and remember to dress conservatively (no pun intended).