Invincible 6: Guilty

This is part six in a seven-part serial. The finale will run on Tuesday. This piece was also included in full in our recent collection of spiritual writing, Spiritus Oppidum, Vol. 1. Past and future online installments can be found here.

Then came the day when the words “addictive”, “abuse”, and “crush” were first mentioned during one of our “lunches”.

The fiscal year had just ended, and the numbers were in. Wouldn’t you know it? My creation had just cleaned house once again, with gross sales of that one product alone exceeding two billion dollars. That’s billion with a “b,” boys and girls. We discussed the numbers briefly, and then one of the PR guys started in with the bad news. It was explained that my little darling had become what the media coyly referred to as a “drug of abuse”. There had been many instances of overdose recently. Even some deaths.

As a chemist, this didn’t shock me. For thousands of years mankind has used the opium poppy as a source of medicine to dull pain or induce relaxation or sleep. The tendency of substances derived from the poppy to cause dependency, if not full-blown addiction, is well documented. Thus, I wasn’t surprised in the least to hear these things. After some more lunches and meetings and golf, after digesting and processing the data (the parts we cared to acknowledge, anyway), we made a decision.

Obviously, the physicians – the ones whom our sales and marketing teams had courted and cajoled and showered with free samples and all-inclusive vacations masquerading as “pain-management seminars” – whom, depending on how much of our product they prescribed, we had magically been able to find countless paid speaking engagements for, were simply underprescribing. Naturally.

The (no pun intended) fix? Prescribe more. Make those doses stronger and more frequent. Supplement our time-released painkiller with a script for its immediate-release cousin. For breakthrough pain, we called it. We never officially said anything about there being a dependency risk, so prescribe away! No Dr. X, don’t bother looking for a safer alternative – there is none. No Dr. Y and Dr. Z, our product is not habit-forming. Perish the thought.

Once it started, it didn’t ever seem to let up, though, and in the middle of that stress and controversy, a tidbit of the Latin I had studied briefly in college surfaced in my mind unexpectedly, like a response in one of those Magic Eight-Ball toys. But instead of saying it is almost certain or the answer is unclear, it said abyssus abyssum invocat. Literally, “Hell invokes Hell”. In this situation, “one misstep leads to another” is the most apt translation. Sure, the number of people abusing the medicine was increasing. Sure, the overdoses and deaths were steadily mounting. But we decided that the people being affected by this were simply Bad People. They were the issue, not my precious little creation that had improved the lives of untold millions of people.

By this time I had begun thinking of people as numbers or statistics (a key characteristic of any self-respecting big-time corporate asshole), and I got good at it quickly. It’s amazing how much guilt can be avoided by a simple mind-game like that. The rising numbers just went to show how many weak-willed people were out there. The dregs of society, we thought. They probably robbed and raped and pillaged whenever they weren’t busy abusing drugs. People like this needed to be punished for their moral bankruptcy. These addicts were on the one hand, but more than balanced off by all the good, honest, innocent people living more comfortable lives thanks to us. Thanks to me. Right?

Personally, I had begun losing weight due to stress, not to mention drinking and smoking more. At times, I was so distraught I wouldn’t go in to work for days on end. Not that it impacted me financially, of course. On those days, I would pull out that ragged old doll and think about Dad’s lesson at the dump. He and my mother were in their graves by the time my "product" began coming under fire, and for that I’m grateful. I don’t think I would have been able to handle it if either of them had put me to task over what was going on. But his words rang as clear and true to me as they always did, even – no, especially – during the controversy. Instead of now and then, it became my daily mantra. Keep smiling and let it all roll off. Keep smiling and let it all roll off. Keep smiling and let it all roll off. I felt childish, more so for saying it out loud as I did (usually while looking into the mirror in the morning), but father was right, it still helped. It was then that I thought, for the first time ever: Dad, it’s helped me out plenty of times, but will it always? Will the time come for those words, that lesson, to fail me?

Soon we were constantly embroiled in one lawsuit or another. The news made sure everyone knew all about it, too. Goddamned freedom of the press and all. Christ, though, we dished it right back out at them, believe you me. We had an entire department dedicated to combating the increasingly bad press we were getting month after month and year after year, replete with all the best big-city mega-money legal talent money could buy, many high-profile enough that you’ve probably even heard of them or seen them on TV. And why not? Why the fucking hell not? It was only money, and that we were flush with. For a while, it even seemed as though the public was buying it.

With the ever-mounting pressure, I suffered a stroke one day during one of my before-work walks. A passerby called an ambulance. Doctors of course knew who I was. They told me it was a combination of stress, too much alcohol, and too many cigarettes. I gave my vices up reluctantly and, feeling like a captain abandoning his crew and his ship, resigned from my position.

That was all many years ago.

My former employer has since been successfully sued for many billions of dollars, all of which had to come from the personal checkbooks of those in charge. It was an enormous scandal. In fact, they were branded as a pivotal player in the drug epidemic that swept the United States in the early part of the twenty-first century. My health had forced me to leave before the courts landed on us with both feet, so I caught a break on that one, kemosabe. Even if it hadn’t, I think my conscience, which I had managed to put on ice for so long, would have forced me to. My former employer may hold the patent, and they may have been the official scapegoat, but I was involved as well. I had a hand in one of the worst examples of consumer deception in recent history. I, at least as much as anyone else, am guilty.

Guilty.