Quote the Raven, "Nevermore": Escaping the Drug Conditioning Addiction

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Quote the Raven, "Nevermore": Escaping the Drug Conditioning Addiction

     At the age of 12, in 1971, my family's television (TV) sputtered its last sparks from the prongs of its vacuum tubes, and when stations went off the air, the lone Native American test pattern shown on the cathode ray tube, Nevermore. My parents decided not to replace that small TV with its metallic rabbit ears, and it was one of the best things they could have ever done for me. At such a vulnerable teenage age, I was no longer being conditioned by the commercial drivers of commerce. I was left bereft of the conditioning of the masses. Programmed, consumer response was established in my mind, Nevermore. "Proper" social norming presented by fictional families in supposedly popular TV shows and sitcoms was ingrained, Nevermore. I was left only with book, nature, and my imagination -- and what a blessing that has been. Since losing the TV as a teenager I have watched television since then, Seldom-more. I do not do passive, fat-building, sports watching but prefer active involvement in walking, hiking, running, dancing, bicycling, skiing, skating, etc. , Evermore.

     I became an avid reader, sometimes saying up until four in the morning captivated by varying authors and typically sleeping on the hour long bus ride through the countryside to school. My favorites authors were those writing "science fiction"(?) -- Asimov, Bradbury, Verne, Wells, Clark, Burrows, Orwell, etc. -- and many authors from other literary genre like Poe and his deeply rhythmical, emotion laden fare such as "The Raven" (Lee, 2013; Poe, 1845) and "Annabel Lee" (Matuskey, 2016; Poe, 1849). So it has been, Evermore. I have tried social media sites a couple of times like bulletin boards in the 1990's, American Online, MySpace, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube but I have found none of these advertiser driven, user-conditioning, self-reinforcing reality bubbles appealing except for YouTube only because it has partially replaced my music from 8-Tracks, metal bias cassette tapes, CDs, and .mp3s. This background information leads to the fact that I have been reasonably unaffected directly by multimedia advertising, which is one of the most influential types of conditioning due to its combination of audio, visual, textual, and social components. I do not do news sites because of heavy pushes of "personalized" conditioning ads or newspapers because they are mostly yellow these days.

     To answer the question "Is it to the public's best interest when pharmaceutical companies directly advertise new drugs to the consumers?" my response is therefore naturally, Nevermore. The masses are very conditioned, for many years now, to follow instructions given by the "media gods" and their divine messengers. A previous, very wise boss of mine once said to me about recording auto-response phone messages to users calling in wanting information on properties for rent, "People do what you tell them to do". Advertising is now so user-specific targeted that people respond automatically, quite unaware that they have been subconsciously manipulated (Coombe et al.,2020). The Greek-like pharmaceutical sirens have completely obfuscated personal reality to the point that the aspect of critical decision making by laypeople regarding pharmaceuticals is, Nevermore, and the only way out is to take the red pill (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999).

Figure 1.

Red and blue capsule pills, like the ones shown in "The Matrix" (1999) (Carter, 2014).

[RedAndBluePills.png]

     In addition to the mass conditioning of the people as described above, the expansive world drug corporations are working hard to establish a firm stranglehold on the generation of any unbiased studies and official or collegiate recommendation regarding their products (Mucchielli, 2020). Thus in this author's opinion, these companies should not be allowed to advertise directly to the public. Even though it puts physicians in precarious positions of being possibly tempted by kickbacks, the physician is the person laypersons trust to give them unbiased, critically analyzed advise regarding proper prescriptions and many physicians I know feel that their integrity in these matters is critical to the continued relationship with their patients. It is the physicians who are the experts we rely on to make the call and no matter how many people tell their physicians they have "researched" on the Internet (always an awkward situation), it can be generally assumed that the information they may have stumbled on is heavily biased in some manner and therefore not valid most of the time, especially when the bias stems from the pharmaceutical industry advertising and promotional industries in some direct or indirect manner.

     Quite frankly I believe we should have a world-established, trusted, non-profit, non-government, completely unbiased, commercially detached, and well-funded third parties be the designated providers of proof of quality assurance and safety when it comes to any pharmaceuticals that are developed and made available to the public. It would be good to have something akin to what Ralph Nader and Nader's Raiders did in the past for consumer protection by expanding and increasing funding to Ralph Nader's brainchild, the Public Citizen group (Safe and Affordable Drugs and Devices: Safety and Oversight, 2023), so that it could focus more deeply on the consumer drug production and distribution industries. Could this be done given our current state of affairs and public conditioning/control? Likely not, but if it were somehow possible, such an effort would be the optimal solution. It would certainly be beneficial to the health of all, Evermore, and help stop drug company hanky-panky with a firm message of "Nevermore".

References

Carter, W. (2014). Red and Blue Capsule Pills, Like the Ones Shown in "The Matrix" (1999). Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Retrieved on February 24, 2023 from https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

Coombe, D., Curtis, V., Orlowski, J. (2020, September 9). The Social Dilemma [Video]. Netflix. Retrieved on February 24, 2023 from https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224

Lee, C. (2013, June 24). The Raven [Video]. Edgar Allen Poe (1845, January). YouTube. Retrieved on February 24, 2023 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BefliMlEzZ8

Matuskey, B. (2016, August 7). Annabel Lee [Video]. Edgar Alan Poe (1849). YouTube. Retrieved on February 24, 2023 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scVmAssRZoc&t=28 

Mucchielli, L. (2020). Behind the French Controversy Over the Medical Treatment of Covid-19: The Role of the Drug Industry. Journal of Sociology, 56(4), 736–744. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783320936740

Poe, E. A. (1845, January). The Raven. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved on February 24, 2023 from https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1065

Poe, E. A. (1849). Annabel Lee. Internet Archive. In Poems by Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 80-82. Retrieved on February 24, 2023, from https://archive.org/details/poemsbyedgaralla00poee/page/n87/mode/2up . Archived at https://archive.org/

Safe and Affordable Drugs and Devices: Safety and Oversight. (2023). Public Citizen Foundation. Retrieved on February 24, 2023, from https://www.citizen.org/topic/safe-affordable-drugs-devices/

Wachowski, L. & Wachowski, L. (1999, March 31). The Matrix [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved on February 24, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuE0Mtr-w6g

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