Pharmed Out

The author in no way supports a belief in the particular conspiracy theory this brief tale offers, nor that data - if ever made available - would support such an extreme (though perhaps not illogical) conclusion.

However, as with the saying one million monkeys will eventually type Shakespeare, at the obviously illimitable flow of such floor-scrapings theories from Hollywood’s sausage-link engines of consumable product, surely and eventually, at least one such improbable entertainment theory will finally prove to be odiously correct. Probability dictates that it will be so.

Then we’ll have a whole new genre of reality tv show to captivate us:
“Conspiracy Theory TV Show Plots That, Amazingly, Have Been Proven To Be True!!!”

No real facts were used in the creation of this story.

…name and address withheld,
Cyberspace.



Drug Away (Working Title)

Pandemic Chaos. Un Huh. That was pretty clear right away. She could feel the yawning pit of chaos right away and her stomach lurched, like at the sight of the 25 degree compound tibia fracture her brother Jake hoisted dripping from the lake, the hideous displacement precisely hidden by parallax from the still-cheering neighbour kids 'till it broke the glassy surface - following his first and last attempt at bike jumping off the wharf that long hot summer ago. Her father had insisted on leaving the bike on the bottom, a rusting reminder that had failed to curtail her brother’s try-anything-once spirit.

They’ll have no one to blame but themselves, she thought, for putting such overwhelming computing power in the hands of the many. And Sharold, a post-grad student in pharmacology, had always been more than a decent student. Her sparks of real - and sometimes vocal - thinking had brought begrudged apologies from several profs who had peevishly complained that her “staring out of windows” suggested anything from “willful inattention” to “trolling for tennis players” (the insufferable English Lit. boor "Dr." Gerald Wilkins) But that Eng. Lit. twit was far behind now as courses became more specialized, and long ago she’d managed to gain manual control of her neck and tongue - to her current profs’ evident satisfaction.

This, her most recent grand idea, had surfaced during Biostatistics 600 (a computer heavy number-cruncher course where medical outcome hypotheses could be generated and tested with extreme power on the new sixth-wave personal computers) and had so blossomed as she became entranced with the questioning power of these statistical methods that she spent way too much time staring into her tiny 15” monitor, developing nagging headaches and a cramping and stiff neck.

Reaching for a nightly analgesic (pain reliever! God, she hated those pompous medical terms) became necessary to 'keep at it', and while recalling the old “got a headache, take a pill” TV commercial from the last centuries’ 80s, she was blind-sided by another conspiracy-theory epiphany.

She saw the obvious: she was able to work longer by treating her symptoms - as she dutifully entered them in her self-reporting journal for a pedantic stats. class - but she also knew her ‘ergonomic nightmare chair‘ as a her roommate called it and her lounging posture were still causing the strain. “By the time you’ve finished this course you’ll have ‘permanent physical sequalea‘”; Her friendly but seemingly uninspired roommate Penny seemed to have no qualms with the jargon, or perhaps just spouted it to see her rise to the bait - she was never quite sure just what Penny had going on upstairs. But clearly, at least in this case, treating the early symptoms of a disease could lead to disease progression. What if that were a general case? What if treating any symptom, essentially a short-circuiting of the bodies sympathetic feedback response system ("ouch this hurts - then don't do that, dummy"), in preventing the patient from experiencing all the physiological and psychological responses suffering brings, made all disease last longer?

What if the whole neatly stocked/blocked/faced and priced display of hundreds of over-the-counter products at one's local pharmacy actually did keep one sick longer? Never being willing or able to stop too soon (she preferred brain adventures, but had much the same ‘give er nails’ spirit of her brother Charles), and loving to dabble in complex conspiracy theory creation to amuse and/or unnerve Penny, depending on her skill at tangled web weaving...what if 'They' knew? To her it was obvious that 'They', the pharmaceutical giants she had always mildly distrusted, had always held economics more dearly that ethics. The evidence was overwhelming to her, and to many who'd seen the inside working of research dollar allocation from the big three parmacorps that in return for their largesse sipped a billion dollars a day through the seven hundred thousand corner drug stores throughout America - treating the whole corpus populi for everything from scalp itch to plantar warts.

In fact, if it were true, how could They not know? Now there was a conspiracy theory that would make Penny squirm! The whole over-the-counter compendium: nothing more than products designed to keep you sick longer, albeit with a little less discomfort than with untreated symptoms. She could even imagine the meeting where the damning internal data were revealed to the Squelq and Maerck execs - and their 'corporate ethics' type response that..."well sure they may stay sick a bit longer, but they'll feel better doing so, and, in the grand scheme of things, that must be what the people want; The customer is always right...until they've finally left us." "Hah, Hah, good one Baker! Now, if you ever say that again you'll be lucky to be cleaning toilets for this corporation the next day"

She launched it on Penny at breakfast the next morning, one of the those thought bombs she would casually drop that could bring Penny's eyes from early-morning puffy slits of academic distain to gaping orbs of sparkle and racing wonderment in a moment.

But today, despite Sharold's feeling that this was among the best she'd ever hatched, Penny's response was unexpected: "Sounds interesting..." she replied without lifting her eyes from the March '08 Journal of the A.M.A. from which she was apparently cramming for an upcoming exam. "You don't get it" prodded Sharold, clearly disappointed and again questioning her roommate's wit and mental wizardry. "Ya, ya, I get it", said Penny. "You know, if you'd spend more of your precious time and huge cranium on useful research instead of such wanking tripe you probably could have graduated by now". Surprised, Sharold fell silent and studied Penny's down-turned face uneasily - until she raised her head and laughed. "Just riding you, doofus. But let me get his reading done or I'll be as far behind as you pretty soon."

In less than twenty minutes Penny had left for the medical ethics discussion group meeting she attended, irreligiously she said, twice a month. Over the two years they had roomed together, Sharold had heard Penny describe these meetings as anything from tortuous drudgery to a cesspool of pointless pontificators. Though she never discussed their content - "too boring to recall" she would moan - she was never late or absent.

At these third-floor board room meetings at a local three star hotel, student representatives, faculty and pharmindustry reps debated ongoing and pending pharmaceutical research, both at the university and in the wide world abroad, and brain stormed, suggested, discussed, derided, planned, vetted, funded and reported on every pharmaceutical research project they could fit into the allotted time. Penny had joined the MedEthics Group within two weeks of her arriving as a transfer from Loyola where she’d been en route to her pharmacology Ph.D. “Loyola blew” was Penny’s curt, dismissive and only reply to any questions offered about her time there.

Sharold turned to see the screen saver (her former boyfriends' face appearing and disappearing in different sizes and positions) at her corner alcove workstation and sighed. One of these days she'd erase him...but not today. Not yet.

She found in her sinking mood though, as she often did, another flash of inspiration: a ball dropping from the highest point giving the greatest rebound, etc. If her morning conspiracy theory had left Penny’s funny bone flaccid, perhaps a little subtly-cooked research data and some quick-witted conspiracy patter could bring her around in the afternoon? Penny usually seemed to delight in Sharold's forays into these imaginative and off-kilter worlds and at the thought of losing her appreciative audience she had been depressed. She plonked herself at the keyboard, poked a few keys…then stopped. Why not run the questions from the real data sets first, see where any plausible leads might lie, then corrupt only what was needed to skew things appropriately? Penny would probably only look so closely before being swayed…a little at least…and using the real data would add realism.


“Why do work unnecessary to the end product” was a mantra of sorts with Sharold. She authorized her secure connection to the university's multi-linked data bank, ignored the flash intro where disclaimers and threats of prosecution reigned, and tapped out her ever-changing password within the five seconds it remained visible on her time synched and diode lit password card. As the gears of access approval ground away somewhere, she stopped to think about her approach. It should be fairly simple to merge the state-wide pharmacy OTC sales data set with the recent web-based self-reporting work by Bludger et. al. to show...She was off the deep end almost at once - and still bent forward and peering at scrolling numbers with a frown when Penny returned at six.

Penny seemed to have recovered her regular vacuously cheery demeanor and was soon complaining about everything from the walk to the bus stop to a Dr. Pankhurst’s tie that was “unfit to twist tie a bag of @%#& closed”. Sharold bantered helpfully in all the right places. When Penny finally headed off to change for supper Sharold hit <print> and stood to have a look at what the heavily crunched real numbers might say on the first trial. If only she could get it finished in time and slipped subtly on the table with supper so she could casually push it across to Penny and say...“Oh My God!” She fell straight down, and was immediately grateful the chair was there. While the printer had worked away she’d envisioned the way the graphs would need to appear to support her latest 'conpothesis' (as she called them), planning a subtle but convincingly robust distribution. Nothing too obvious, no perfect trends, or Penny might be suspicious.

What Sharold saw immediately in the boxes and shotgun-blast looking data plots was just that obvious and altogether too perfect. But it was clearly real. Every one of the forty-seven OTC product she’d run in her trial, from A.S.A. to Z-Ban, all those non-prescription drugs that are OTC only by virtue of their ‘proven’ safety with self-administration (and without medical supervision), yet drugs they surely are, increased the self-reported time to regain health. Now she gasped audibly, but hearing the bathroom door swinging open she hurriedly shuffled the three-colour plots under a canting magazine pile and spun to face Penny’s freshly washed face - and quizzical look.

“Oh, just some trials of a new query I was running. I’ll show you later when I tidy up the outliers a bit”. They often kidded about such data fudging, and as Penny seemed to accept Sharold’s hasty explanation at face value she turned and dropped fatalistically into her place at the table hoping Penny would do the same.

Soon both were wolfing down their veggie pasta salad with little talk. But behind Penny’s clear and collegial expression the waters of thought were turbid and poisonous.

In the morning, Penny mumbled a mouthful of something about a forgotten prior commitment and hurried off, leaving Sharold alone to tidy the mounting dishes pile before her late-morning Stats. 600 class. “Whistle while you work.” As she dipped the first fork into the sink, she hummed a little tune and leaned over to sight down the alley, between their coapts and the admin. building next door that led toward the main campus square.

Penny was still visible halfway up the alley, her brisk swinging-arm style clearly identifying her to Sharold even at this distance. Sharold had leaned further to continue to watch her progress, craning her stiff neck to maintain a view past the cactus and a huge aloe plant an Agrology student next door had crammed onto her tiny balcony, when Penny broke stride and glanced around. She appeared to shift slightly and knocked low against a door Sharold hadn't noticed much before, thinking it a janitor or other service entrance and never having seen it opened. It opened within a few seconds and Penny disappeared within.

Dr. Weeden Pankhurst walked behind Penny in reverberative heel-clicking silence down a long concrete corridor under the colour-coded pipes and HVAC distribution ducting. She stepped aside and waited as he bent to code open the plain steel door marked only: HVAC: Authorized Personnel Only! Successful, he stepped aside and gestured Penny forward with impatience. Meeting with these damned moles, while admittedly serving a necessary purpose, he found distasteful. The breathless accounts of their crafty maneuverings to overhear of a “new research prospectus from Quad Seven that could be very harmful to the cause if pursued” he found childish; and as they had always been wrong to date, he resented the continued responsibility of riding herd over the nine misanthropes, malcontents and ne’er-do-wells he had recruited.

Still, despite their usual ineptitude and melodrama, useful information had been gained, though infrequently, and Pankhurst’s superiors were unlikely to take his griping kindly: “Are we not paying you sufficiently, Dr. Pankhurst”, Squelq point-man Barry Triste had replied icily through his closed-tooth grin to Pankhurst’s only voiced complaint during the two years he had been heading the snoop group.

Penny, never one to beat the bushes, dropped her most recent dossier on the gray steel table with a ringing smack, the near empty room echoing at length. “It’s Sharold Deuling, Dr. P.” (Aarrghh! Damned colloquial infants and their familiarisms.) “She sprung this one on me this morning and I nearly choked on my toast. I caught her plotting out something later today so when she left for class I hacked her machine and…well...just look for yourself!” “Well, I guess I must at that” he droned, hiding his condescension, and sat to examine the rows of numbers, box plots and Pearson correlations in front of him.

He was soon making his own breathless call over a secure line, his voice quavering and crackling as he revealed what the megapharmacorps had hoped would never be revealed. Barry Triste’s only reply after at least twenty seconds of silence...“Well, you’ve earned it all today, Pankhurst. And, by the way, damn you all to hell.”

As Penny disappeared inside, Sharold turned from the now empty alley view and hurried back to her pc. She reached under the magazine pile to find her earlier printouts, stopped with a confused look as she pulled them free. There was a small blotch of something in the top right corner of the first page, smudged and streaked, like jelly or ketchup; jelly it clearly was, her quick taste confirmed. She didn't eat jelly, though it was always in the fridge.

She dropped into her chair and rattled off her screen saver password without glancing up, then opened her self-scripted activity logging software running clandestinely and continuously to document any unauthorized use of her system - should hacking ever occur. Penny! Penny must have scoped Sharold's password over her shoulder recently, “or mabye delved it in some more cerebral manner” she mocked aloud slowly shaking her head, but it was clearly Penny's grinning face in the data logged web-cam image as Sharold's password was last keyed. "Well, well, well...Look first to the obvious, I always say. Nailed ya, Henny Penny, you dunce!"

But as overly devout followers of Occam may finally learn, a hastily wielded razor will eventually cut just a little too closely...and the resulting mess can obscure one vital divot of truth that will bend a seemingly simple holing-out into the final unplayable lie.

Triste replaced the phone and turned back to Pankhurst with a sigh. “Well, I trust your little snoop followed protocol and implanted the early correction fluid.” Correction fluid: one of Triste’s more palatable terms for the two-part (agent and activator) systemic poison that had been used -only twice to date and of necessity - to remove those who were deemed too close to the discovery Sharold’s twisted imagination had unraveled as a lark. If it became clear that she must go, one further miniscule oral dose of now the activating compound (‘late correction fluid’: Triste ), delivered in or on anything placed in the mouth would, within hours, induce a fatal aneurysm indistinguishable from natural causes.

Pankhurst‘s reply was brisk with sarcasm: “Yes, yes, I supplied and authorized that immediately. It was delivered in, I believe, a lovely raspberry jelly this morning. We have video confirmation of its’ consumption. That Penny is sharp as a tack - for all her infuriating jargon and school-girl mannerisms.” Triste looked up from under his bushy brows and smiled with his teeth alone. “Well, it’s time to make it so, Captain. For the third time, They are telling me ‘make it so’”

Sharold scooped up her small stack of evidence, and, stuffing it into her tattered rucksack, threw it behind the couch. She stopped for the full seventy seconds to brush her teeth -Penny had always accused her of obsession on that count - then burst from their room and rocketed three stairs at a time down toward the lobby. She had just called Terry Schaefer, her Stats. 600 prof., but had to leave a voice mail message when he failed to answer after four rings. “I’ve got something I just couldn’t believe at first, Terry!” she blurted. “Well...You’ll just have to hear it when I get there…but this is huge… scary...just unbelievably awful! If I’m right, well...I’ll be waiting in your office whenever you get back!” Click.

Terry had been three hours on the tennis court, and after a hard fought five-set match with Jenkins from MedEthics stopped for a much-needed shower then swim at the “Y” on his way home. When he finally arrived at his office ‘spot-on’ at 8:30 A.M., clean, refreshed and enervated, Sharold sat slumped, cold and unmoving, in the only waiting room chair. He allowed a slight smile, but not toward the security camera.

Back in the apartment, Penny retrieved the rucksack, keyed into Sharold’s system and
began to methodically wipe the offending data, whistling tunelessly and grinning into the
web cam. Finally, quietly, in her best Monty Python waiting-room nurse’s voice, she
asked... “Sure you’ve brushed your teeth enough now, my love? Next?...Next?”


Two

Some months ago I posted this story to a commercial web-based readers group offering free basic memberships: my first creative writing since grade school, and I thought it was quite good (but perhaps not worthy of spending any money). After some obscurity (it’s hard to get noticed) I got some nice reviews! One reviewer picked it apart line by line in a professorial manner, word by word, then concluded ‘he had almost liked it, and she never likes anything’; I knew it was a winner. Haw! Haw! It needed lots more work, but as a basic start, it was dang ok! Maybe I have a future in this...

So I sat back and smugly watched the positive reviews mount up, got a surprising bunch of credits of some kind in my ‘account’ donated by other authors who’d enjoyed the work and were promoting it! I had started another story (“Wes Turn’d”) but stopped that to work at editing “Drug Away”, really prune it down and make it sing, you know…I didn’t visit the site for a week: feeling a little self-obsessed with the mounting totals
(and not liking the disappointment when I was too eager and there had been no change).

In the interim an email came from the site manager - that because of the language “Drug Away” was being moved from the G category to R, adults only; He hoped I wasn’t offended - felt himself that they were very minor transgressions - and indicated the story would reappear soon in the correct category. I wasn’t offended…surprised maybe…but didn’t reply. Oh well, I could easily edit that one bit of British slang and get back in their good books - I thought.

When I finally had the main editing out of my system I returned to the site to post my update, and while I was there composed a witty? little shingle for the ‘Request Reviews Please’ bulletin board page… hit <return>.

We’d moved IPs since I’d posted the story initially - and after the 'censor’s' email arrived - so I thought I had some trouble with my email address not being recognized, but when I got the password right for the third time trying various of my latest likely addys it seemed to accept me and I watched it crank away for a minute or two. Success (this was dial-up)!

I returned a few days later to check out my online revision… and read all those rave new reviews…I was imagining hopefully, I am sure…big subconscious dreamer me, I suspect…Sad.

But my revision never appeared. The blurb I’d posted to advertise my revision never appeared. I tried to view my site as just a regular user (not an exalted "author member") but could find no mention of me, my old handle ‘Stewart’, or my other few short bits I’d posted earlier; I’d disappeared.

I tried to email the site manager but never received a reply. It was like I’d become invisible - persona non grata. There was a phone number, but it being in San Diego I wasn’t about to call long distance from here in Canada for such a piddling matter; I couldn’t be bothered with them, and I’d been becoming annoyed by their constant advertising for upgraded memberships and other costly crap in which I had no interest…I’d been getting more unsolicited mail (some pretty weird)... Too bad, because some of the author members had seemed very helpful and kind and I’d enjoyed the interchange. Oh, well, live and learn, nothing for free these days. Move on.

That was three months ago. Strange things have happened since. I am actually worried. You’ll say, “it’s silly”, and, “he’s still writing a story and this is just part of it”, but its not that at all. I can’t say more here: some one may be intercepting this message - it’s so easy these days. I am convinced that they are trying to find me, but as I never did use the help phone number (*69, right?), and fortunately Canada has a difficult IP regulatory structure for an U.S. interest to penetrate, I think I am safe for now. I have a family I care about a lot and wouldn’t want them hurt for a silly story.

So I have decided this story must be shelved, personally speaking. I have dropped my internet access and actually burned the older computer where the work resided (computer forensics can resurrect any level of software delete and many apparently devastating physical destructions can still be recovered despite one’s belief in their permanence: fire and lots of it was required). Note my real name has never appeared with this story…perhaps I intuited trouble at the beginning?

Please read this anonymous story and consider the ramifications of my thesis. By coincidence I heard today a CBC woman revealing the fetid innards of the multi-national pharmaceutical giants and their “lifestyle disease promotion” marketing campaigns…would such people stop at anything if I am right? Or even if I am wrong but they find my writings…inconvenient? Am I in my one first stroke now the literary ‘under-man’ of Philip Dick’s “Our Friend’s from Frolix 8”: doomed to soul-silence or the vain cranking out of ‘tracks’ of social revelation and revolution from an eventual bunker-buster target?

Nope. However…prudent avoidance: I now brush my teeth with baking soda; I am sure such an irony would not escape even 'them'.

Don’t get me started on the insurance industry or I’ll be in even more trouble.

End.

stewart