Bottoms Up

You’ve got to be kidding.
Last week, CNN.com announced the development of a new pill designed to help people quit smoking and lose weight. Now, one week later, the new pill’s uses have expanded to helping people kick alcohol and drug habits.
The irony is almost palpable.
As a culture, we used to marginalize such “miracle pills,” banishing them to the back pages of Cosmo next to ads for miracle-hair-growth shampoo and penis enlargements. Sure, a pill to make you thin, busty and tan would be tempting, but the possible health risks associated with dosing out beauty were simply too great. Now, it seems, we’re not only willing to fund trials of such pills, but we’re considering taking them in order to circumvent our other addictions.
This is just not going to work. A pill to get people off pills? A pill to get people off cigarettes, or the bottle, or the Atkins diet?
This idea is so outlandish, it is no longer even laughable, and yet here it is on a major national news source rather than in the classified pages of women’s magazines.
At what point will this American obsession with an easy answer go too far?
The low-carb craze is one thing. Sure, we all know that if we would just get up and work out for an hour every day we could eat, more or less, whatever we want.
But it’s so much easier to just give up certain foods that we deny ourselves pasta and bread rather than just getting off our couches once in a while. But to think that a simple pill will be the answer to our biggest national epidemics – addiction, obesity and smoking – is to delude ourselves more than ever before.
No miracle pill is going to teach teenagers to accept themselves as they are, rather than as advertisers would convince them to be.
It will never manage to bring down the obesity-related medical costs we deal with each year to an acceptable level. It won’t ease our dependence on foreign oil, or unite our political divides, or better educate our children.
It will pull the wool over our eyes.
Instead of funding research for a miracle pill, why not address the issues that we do have control over: our children, education, and our place in the world? This pill has to be the pinnacle of laziness.
Even if it turned out to be as big a miracle as it claims and can cure addiction and obesity, at what cost? Parents love to lecture to their children about working through things and not taking the easy way out. We should not be content, as adults, to be so lazy.