Walmart Pharmacy, yesterday, filling a prescription for ibuprofen. 90 800 mg doses, and I just paid on autopilot. Then I noticed that it had cost me $10.00 rather than the $4.00 I had anticipated. Still preoccupied, I walked past the over the counter pain killer section and decided that it was worth just a glance. There I could have gotten a bottle of 500 200 mg tabs for less than $7.00. A 100 1,000 mg dose equivalent.
No ones fault but my own? Or blame the deal that Obama cut with Billy Tauzin (ex-D Rep. from La., and then Big Pharama lobbyist) at the very front end of pushing Obamacare?
Nah! I mean, I still resent the fact that we have a market based health care system in a real world where essentially none of us can or do know how to be informed consumers in this type of health care business model. But I also know that the deal that Obama sold us out in with Tauzin is still light years better than the standard sellout price that the Republic party has always functioned on when dealing with the health care "marketplace".
Sure, we're dead meat either way, but, under Obamacare we might leave this world with enough left over to actually pay for our own funeral, and we wouldn't have even a prayer of that under the R's!
But ibuprofen criminals? Yeah, for the most part, still that!
You see, the key here is Title 21 of the United States Code, Section 841, and 21 U.S.C. 841 is the mainstay of the entire War on Drugs. There's mucho shit in Title 21, including the fact that every prescription drug (by definition) is placed on a "Schedule", and every Scheduled Drug is "regulated". And the specific function of Section 841 is to prohibit any and every distribution of any and every Scheduled drug in violation of any and every provision of Title 21. (Sadly, pot is placed in Schedule 1, and Schedule 1 drugs, being among the most bad assed substances on earth, really can almost never be legally distributed).
But I digress. And I'll confess that I've never actually looked up the scheduling for ibuprofen. On the other hand, it's largely an irrevelancy because all prescription drugs are scheduled (again, by definition). And the distribution of any and every Scheduled Drug in violation of Title 21 is criminalized by Section 841.
In our family, us kids were always getting sick, and always seeing doctors, and always getting prescriptions. And the cycle must have seemed never ending to our parents. And then, of course, there were also their own bouts with colds, flu, etc. A seemingly never ending stream of prescription pain killers, prescription antibiotics, etc. And then what. Throw unused pills away, or put them in the medicine cabinet and try to economize a bit next time?
Well, our Congress, and our Drug Warriors, and our Drug Warrior Congress, in their infinite wisdom, have managed to get things so screwed up that they've criminalized even the normal law abibing behavior of normal law abiding families in their normal lives.
I mean, it's like running stop signs and stop lights, and most of us are never prosecuted most of the times that we run stop signs and stop lights, but it's all still illegal. And in the area of the surplus ibuprofen pills in the family medicine cabinet, the technical federal felonies (and, no "felonies" is not a typo) include such otherwise mundane acts as giving a family member a pill from the prescription of another family member, and even taking our own pills to work with us, but not remembering to possess them in the pill bottle that the Pharmacist originally sold them to us in. (And, of course, multiple counts if you take the pill from your bottle, send it to school with the kid, and wrap it in something to put it in the lunch box.)
In a way, it reminds me of when Rush Limbaugh was "doctor shopping" for pain killers when his back injury resulted in him becomming addicted. But, of course, that was different.
And the way that our familes organize our purchase and use of our medical prescriptions is, of course, different.
But, then again, if this really is the way that we, as a society feel the need to organize our affairs in this area, what, of all of the "drug crimes" that we send millions of people to prison for constantly, really is not that different?