the tiny print

i feel like it was the 1990’s when i started noticing this…

…like the late 1990’s. post-mom 1990’s.

that was when i started noticing that pharmaceutical commercials, which ran about thirty seconds, were only about twelve seconds of actual advertising, and about eighteen seconds of listing all the side effects of the poison they were selling.

and so it began.

now it’s so commonplace we’re all used to it. we’ve grown numb to it. who knew massive lists of drug side effects would, in fact, create their own side effect of being desensitized to them? nowadays if they want to get our attention their either needs to be a massive amount of them or they have to be really fucking weird…

…this is about the latter, which you have to admit is a lot more fun than just an overwhelming laundry list of stuff. it’s an older study, but it’s a goodie.

there was (i assume ‘was’ – is it still prescribed after they found this out?) a drug prescribed for parkinson’s and restless leg syndrome that, in a 2014 study, was found to “trigger pathological gambling, compulsive shopping and hyper-sexuality”.

it all has to do with a flood of dopamine, apparently, which can trigger “feel good behavior” like shopping, fucking or gambling. the study i read gets a little more into it, but that appears to be the gist.

maybe this explains my lotto purchases and credit card balances? i wonder if the supplements i take combine to make this in my system? sure would be nice to play the blame game on some of my issues!