Lucky the Tourist Takes His Meds

I remember, back in the nineties, the first television ads for a prescription drug. They made their brand a magic word, a mystery with effects but no purpose, like the lead-off syllables in some drastic incantation that would make life better. If they’d told us its properties (benefits, reason for being etc) they would also have had to spell out is drawbacks; rattle off the impotence, blindness, arrhythmia and death. Full disclosure or zero. So we got pictures of happy people like villagers after the catastrophe. Some ancient evil defeated. But what? Such well shaped smiling middle class, how can I get that? It’s (whispering) Rogaine.

Rogaine?
Rogaine.
Ask your doctor.
I have a doctor?
These happy people do and they asked him and now…Rogaine.
Rogaine?
What does it do?
(whispering) Rogaine…

I remember lunch in high school with everyone twittering, speculating what it could be.
Did teenagers need it?
Could we get it even if we didn’t?

Rogaine’s tack only half worked, more frustrating the audience than enticing it to buy. As a result, the escalating television drug war; heart burn, congestion, asthma, mysterious ailments without cures or even notable cause, spurious offers and terrifying claims.
Medicine has begun to seem like an escalating series of dares.

Advair treats asthma but may also cause, --ASTHMA RELATED DEATH--. It either makes your condition better or FATAL.

I’m sitting watching TV with my mom and a smiling man mocks his neighbor’s flaccid hose.
Embarrassing, no? What’s the etiquette?
“If you experience an erection lasting four hours consult a doctor.”
GREATGOOGLIEMOOGLIE!
At what point does the damn thing start to bruise?

Thanks TV, the last place a guy can go for an awkward evening at home, everyone trying to ignore the huge throbbing penis in the room.

Seek medical attention if you experience vision loss…I thought that was a myth, like hairy palms.
Vision loss, priapism, heart failure and death.

Four hours? Frankly, I’m calling in a S.W.A.T. team after thirty minutes.