Sonicrusk Blog

I was watching The McLaughlin Group today. It was a different type of episode. Usually, he has four pundits of all types of political ideology sitting around on a set arguing about the week’s political news. This week’s episode dispensed with that. It was all about health care.

McLaughlin had some heavy hitters on the panel: the Secretary of Health and Human Services for the United States, some big-wig physician with “Permanente” (can only assume it’s Kaiser), a journalist from The Newshour, and the CEO of Pfizer.

Certain health care issues kept coming up. Of course, that 45 million Americans are uninsured, and that it is expensive. Lots of facts thrown around; I don’t know the veracity of each one: GM spends more on health care than steel, 125,000 Americans die each year from medical error. One of the panel members said that the US spends 14-16% of all money spent every year on health care. Can you believe that? The journalist and the Secretary both agreed that electronic medical records across the board for the entire company would save 100 BILLION dollars. Sweet Jesus!

Another concept that was oft-repeated during the episode was preventive medicine. The CEO mentioned several times how preventable diseases like hypertension, Diabetes,  obesity, and “certain types of cancer” contribute to running up health care costs.

That last part made me think, since they were obviously talking about tobacco-related illness. For a split second, I thought, “What if they just got rid of all the tobacco in the country?” That is obviously pretty stupid, as it doesn’t factor in the subsequent black market and tens of millions of pissed off people it would create. Then I remembered reading about the nicotine vaccine.

I know that quite a few regular readers of this blog have dealt with nicotine, myself included. It’s easy to be sanctimonious nowadays against the smoker or dipper. Find the biggest fuck-up – if you are a tobacco user and they aren’t, they thumb their nose at you. It’s commonplace and sanctioned. To those that have never had the habit, I always tell them to imagine a month without water. A month in which they would not die, but they could not imbibe any fluids by mouth. After that, you wouldn’t really crave water anymore but whenever someone was taking a hearty swig in the middle of summer, chances are you would lick your lips wanting some. Willpower would have to take over during those unexpected cravings. Also, chances are, you would probably spend the month craving water all day and feeling like crap. Your concentration would wane. There’s cold turkey for you.

From what I’ve read about this nicotine vaccine, it removes the pleasure of the drug derived. You don’t get the kick, and therefore, will find the act of smoking of dipping fruitless. Considering what The CEO, The Secretary, The Journalist, The Physician, and The Candlestick Maker were all talking about on McLaughlin, maybe this should be a priority instead of some of these “esteem” drugs.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 0:36 and is filed under Originals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.