...When All is Said and Dunn

The legal drug industry seems to be taking over. Not just with our dependence on their products, but in geography and advertising. If anyone had told me 5 years ago that in my little town of Temple City, bridal shops would be given a run for their money in numbers by drug stores, I would have told them they were high.

I just don’t get this one. How many drugstores does one area need? As it stands right now, within 3 miles of where I live there are currently 5 drugstores with a 6th being built and a 7th being proposed for the redevelopment property where the Edwards Temple Cinema now stands. Sure that last one is supposed to replace one of the existing ones, but so what? In my mind, that’s still way more than this small area really needs.

The stores I am referring to are not the independently owned ones, but the big chains, Rite Aid, Sav-On and Walgreen’s. I don’t see how any independently-owned corner drugstore can continue to exist, and most of them have already reached their expiration dates. Many of the local ones have already become bridal shops, which is just as worthless as having another drugstore chain.

Maybe it’s due to the amount of new drugs that are coming out that the need for new outlets is a must. The pharmaceutical companies seem to be on a run lately. It seems as though every week there is some new drug that will cure your ills with a simple little pill.

Or perhaps it’s not that there are more drugs being made available, but that we are hearing about them more. There is a current glut of advertising that is thrown at us every time we open a magazine or turn on our televisions. Apparently somebody in the drug industry thought that they were missing a prime opportunity in the television advertising market. It all seemed to begin with the Rogaine and Viagra ads and mushroomed from there.

Now I am not anti-drug, quite the contrary, if there is something wrong I am the first one running for the medicine cabinet, much to my family's dismay. Headache? Get me the aspirin, stat. Got a cold? Bring forth the Nyquil and decongestion capsules.

I know some people have either a fear of medicine or religious reasons for avoiding them, but I don’t get that logic. If you are in pain, take something that will alleviate it. It is the same sort of paranoia that people have about new technology. If they don’t understand it they will come up with every lame excuse under the sun not to deal with it or use it.

It’s not the over-the-counter varieties of drugs, the everyday drugs if you will, whose advertisements I find bizarre. It’s the cryptic commercials touting prescription drugs that are getting to me. I have literally watched some of these commercials 20 times and I still don’t know what illness the drug is supposed to be treating. It feels like it's privileged information and some of us are not allowed to know about it. Sorry, it’s top secret and you don’t have clearance.

It’s probably better that we don’t know. Once they finally let you in on the secret and tell you what the prescription drug is for, you really didn’t want to know. And the side effects usually sound more devastating than the disease itself. All drugs, over-the- counter or prescribed, come with warning labels, but for some reason they sound far more ominous when read out loud. It may be my imagination but the ones on television make me cringe.

Warnings like if you have trouble swallowing, breathing, moving your legs, extreme back pain, heart palpitations, blurred vision, swelling in all of your joints, loss of memory, stomach cramps, abdominal pain, headaches, or dizziness contact your doctor immediately.

Are you guys kidding? With those symptoms, I would be on my way to the emergency room and not waiting to see my doctor. By the time I got to see the doctor, especially since I’m with an HMO, I may have grown a second head.

But be sure of one thing: If the current trend of building more drugstores than there are drugs available continues, you certainly won’t have a problem finding one in Temple City. It will probably be located between two bridal shops.

The Shrub Speaks: "The ground grounds me." - Interview with ABC during his current month-long Texas vacation, August 13, 2001