I don’t take a birth control pill, and this is increasingly becoming an issue. It doesn’t seem fair that young, sinful girls get to have so much fun in the name of child prevention while dudes like me have to convince ourselves that putting latex between us and ultimate sexual pleasure is a small price to pay for the assurance that Tony Jr. won’t be slithering out of mommy anytime soon.
Yaz, the highly advertised birth control pill, has to be the greatest drug ever invented. Have you seen the commercials? You take a Yaz and your acne goes away, you get more potassium, the symptoms associated with PMDD disappear (Irritability! Moodiness! Bloating! Feeling Anxious!), your boobs grow, and — oh yeah — you can have more sex than Jenna Jameson and still be 99 percent sure that you won’t have a kid.
This is why women will rule the world one day. While men settle for condoms, women invent a pill that makes you hotter, potassiumier, and less inconvenienced by periods.
But the question I should be asking isn’t, “Where can I get a pill that renders my sperm lame while giving me huge muscles, clear skin, and the inoffensively bland personality of a lobotomy patient?” It’s, “Why the hell do I know so much about a drug that I’m physiologically ineligible to take?”
Since I watch way more Bravo than I should, I’ve seen the Yaz ad countless times. While watching Top Chef I’ve seen the bubbly spot where a few yazzed up women bound about with overacted smiles and educate us about the majesty of the pill.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think Yaz is a miracle drug that all child-hating, acned, mal-potassiumed girls should take, but that doesn’t mean a commercial for it belongs on the airwaves. We take drugs either because we are sick or we don’t want to become sick, not because a commercial was seductive enough to send us to our doctor’s office demanding medication.
Ordinary citizens don’t have the power to prescribe themselves powerful medications for a reason. It is the burden of the doctor to examine his patient and decide which medication is best for the patient’s individual set of conditions.
But when the pharmaceutical companies market prescription medications directly to the public, they destroy the patient-doctor compact. The patient is compelled to demand a drug based not on their overall health but because of a single symptom — having seen a commercial. Now the drug that’s best for the patient both in terms of health and price isn’t necessarily prescribed.
It’s like storming into your doctors office with a slightly sprained wrist demanding a cement cast because the combination of Wilmer Valderrama’s emotional anecdote and that really cute song by that indie band in the cast commercial really struck a nerve.
The endless ads for prescription drugs on TV, and the $4.2 billion a year beyond those direct-to-consumer ads, imply that the pharmaceutical industry wishes to establish itself as a business. It spends money on advertising for the same reasons Keebler or Budweiser do — to drive people to buy their products and thus make money. Lunesta spends a million dollars a day on advertising so that we go to our doctor and demand to shell out the ridiculous sum of money for the drug. Pharmaceutical companies — or so my argument goes — are businesses in the same way as cookie companies.
For cookie companies to be profitable they need the consumers to, a) want cookies, and b) be able to get and eat cookies with relative ease. But drug companies have an added condition — they need consumers to have the disease the drug remedies. It’s as if the cookie companies not only needed the consumers to want and be able to get cookies but also needed the consumers to need cookies — badly. The analogy’s a little strained, but you get the picture.
If the drug companies are businesses, and the sole goal of a business in the free market is to profit, then drug companies need sick people to profit. It’s in the best interest of the drug companies to keep us sick. The survival of the people making and distributing the medicine to remedy our illnesses depends on us remaining ill. It seems as if it’s in their best interest to invent pills that only make us better enough to get sick again.
To curb the intrusion of the malevolent interests of the pharmaceutical industry prescription drug commercials should be banned. All direct-to-consumer advertising of these drugs should be outlawed in order to place the authority back with the doctor — who has decades of medical study and experience that dictates his medical recommendations, as opposed to the 30-seconds of highly focus-grouped, intentionally enticing commercial that the patient is exposed to.
Even if it means fewer girls can experience the superhuman, miraculous benefits of Yaz, at least we’ll be taking the medicine we should be.
Tony Manfred is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at tmanfred@cornellsun.com [1]. The Absurdity Exhibition appears alternate Mondays.
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[1] mailto:tmanfred@cornellsun.com