Florida Agenda

By Christian Alexander

I may have sounded more than a bit cynical when it comes to medication, the doctor’s who prescribe them and the pharmacies that distribute them, but I have reason to be. I have been told by more than one doctor that if I didn’t take their medications for my HIV, I wouldn’t live long enough to follow any of my dreams. These were and are doctors – people I was raised to trust in and believe without question.

For a very long time, I played the good little patient and took their concoctions, all the while feeling worse on them than I did off. After an unscheduled “treatment holiday,” I just stopped taking my meds when my lover was dying. As distraught as I was over what I was going through and my up-coming nervous breakdown, physically I started feeling better. Then, my partner died. I spent more than a few days “resting” at a nearby hospital, all the while denying the HIV medication they wanted to shove down my throat.

When I got out of the hospital, I began drinking … heavily … and often. You know those miniature bottles of booze they serve on airlines? I had them stashed everywhere-around my apartment, in the glove box of the car, in the trunk of the car, hidden in my closets, stashed in my desk at work, hidden all around the spa that I ran. I mean everywhere. Breakfast, lunch and dinner for years.

Somehow I managed to keep up appearances, made it to work, didn’t have any car accidents and kept my quarterly doctor’s appointments for blood work. I had been mostly on and sometimes off my medications since my diagnosis in 1994. My number’s (T-Cells and later viral load) tests were never great, but they were never that bad.

Oddly enough, when I began to disregard my doctor’s orders and got to the stage where I could drink Karen Walker under the table, my numbers actually improved. For over four years, I’d get checked every three months and for four years, I was “ok.” Even though I didn’t feel I needed to be on the meds, the doctor’s spiel was always the same.” You need to be on medication,” and because I had learned a thing or two and argued with them, they never took me seriously.

When I destroyed my life in 2001, I went through detox and rehab. I stayed sober for nearly a year, then I got sick.  Very sick. Several days and two spinal taps, sick. I joked with my doctor that if this was sobriety, I was going back to the bar. He disregarded me, gave me new medication to take. After the scare I had in the hospital, I was inclined to take them. Long story short, it got a lot worse before it got better.

Having been on one of the meds, I was on led to my tranquilizer addiction. I always thought it rather ironic that they would give a known alcoholic heavy duty tranquilizers, but back then, I didn’t know what it was and wasn’t about to question the doctor.

The more I have thought about it, the pharmaceutical companies are greedy. That’s business in America. They are out to make a buck just like everyone else. But, it seems now, we also have more disorders, depression, aches and pains and anxiety than we ever did in the past. Is it that society is under so much stress that our minds and bodies create problems that need to be fixed?  Or is it that the drug companies are creating the need through seeing these trends and are quickly coming up with medications to placate us.

Of course, there are drugs out there that do wonderful things for people. Cancer patients are living longer, although I am forced to question the price for that time. I’ve seen people go through chemo, it’s a literal hell with no guarantee that it will work.

I have no doubt that there will always be a real need for newer and better drugs, but I don’t see anything other than greed by changing a formula on a proven medication just to pad their pockets more.  Sure, an extended release tablet is more convenient, but what is this convenience worth when the older one is available generically for a tenth of the price?  Which do you choose:

convenience or cost? Especially with some insurance companies cutting off paying for the “older” drug in favor of funding the “newest” formula.

Stay healthy, but if you do fall ill, ASK QUESTIONS!!!

By Christian Alexander

As I mentioned previously, if you are watching television for any length of time, some sort of new pharmaceutical product will appear on screen, touting how much better your life will be if you take this drug or that.

The thing is you don’t even have to own a television to learn of these new pills. One trip to your doctor’s office, after he or she has been wined and dined by a representative from the drug companies, and he or she will be telling you how wonderful they are too.
Pharmacists are not immune either. I have a close friend who works for one of the biggest pharmacies in the country. He informed me that a pharmaceutical representative took not only the pharmacist, but the entire department out to a posh restaurant for dinner where just about the only topic was the new pill he was selling.

Doctors and pharmacists aside for a moment, let me take one more journey back to television land. Since every other commercial on TV these days is for some sort of pill, I tend to tune them out or change the channel. On this particular occasion, I had misplaced the remote and since I’ve forgotten how to change the channel manually, I watched the commercials.

After learning how to make my whites even brighter, I was pleased to see a very attractive, muscular man climbing up a mountain. I was equally charmed by the next man, also attractive, jumping off a cliff to go hang gliding. I was infatuated with these fine specimens of manhood until I realized what the commercial was about. A drug commercial, to be sure, but a whole new class of drug commercial. This one told me that HIV/AIDS was no longer a death sentence. It had become a “manageable condition.” I would really like to know when exactly that change in thinking happened and who proposed it? That way, I could call a guy who knows a guy in Jersey to give them a “manageable condition.”

Fine, there are new treatment options out there for those who are just joining the ranks of the HIV community. But, there are a lot more old dogs like me, who have lost too many friends and loved ones, and perhaps wasted their lives because they were all but told they were dying. For this group, these new medications don’t work.

As I’ve done before, I decided to play detective again and do some research on  this new pill that had in one felt swoop changed HIV from a death sentence to a (I love this term) “manageable condition.” I passed over pages and pages of information and the more I read, the more distraught I became.

At one point, mid-way through, I had to take one of my tranquilizers again because what I was reading I just refused to accept. This HIV medication that they were advertising as “brand new” was, in fact, just a combination of three older drugs that have expired patents.

The average patent life, by FDA guidelines, is seven years. In combining them, they technically had come up with a new drug and therefore could renew the patent. Oh, but wait, there’s more!  Even though the usual patent life is seven years, a manufacturer can tie up the rights to the patent for years after it has expired in litigation. If they don’t want to deal with the lawyers at that point, all they need do is tweak the formula for their drug a little.

And this applies to all drugs: anti-depressants, heart medication, blood sugar medication, you name it. The most common way of doing this is by taking a drug that, let’s say, you have to take two or three times a day. By taking the exact same pill and making it an extended release formula that need only be taken once, the pharmaceutical company can get a new patent for another several years. So, in theory, as long as the industry has a lot of good lawyers and a lot of good chemists, they can keep charging as much as they please for medication.

Moral of the story: Always be sure you know what you’re putting in your mouth!