This Is Your Country on Drugs

I commented on this phenomenon in an earlier post, here a college professor re-enforces the idea that I have such a hard time comprehending. We are a nation of pill poppers:

"College students take Ritalin to improve their academic performance. Musicians take beta blockers to improve their onstage performance. Middle-aged men take Viagra to improve their sexual performance. Shy people take Paxil to improve their social performance. The difference is that if athletes want to get performance-enhancing drugs they go to the black market. If the rest of us want performance-enhancing drugs, we go to our family doctors."

The professor at first, attributes this to the free market:

Perhaps this is the inevitable result of turning our medical system over to the market, where making sick people well is often less profitable than making well people better than well. Procter & Gamble, for example, has decided that the profit margins of its ordinary consumer items like Crest toothpaste and Tide laundry detergent are not nearly as appealing as the enormous profit margins of prescription drugs.

But later, I think he makes an even more salient point:

America's appetite for stimulants, antidepressants and Botox injections looks less like enthusiasm and more like fear. It is the look of a Little Leaguer stepping up to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and the bases loaded, terrified that he is going to strike out.

My question is, "Who judges us more harshly: other people, or ourselves?"

UPDATE: Here is an essay from a doctor discussing the patient, doctor, drug relationship and the implications. Interesting insight, including this:

"The next, we discover once again that little known fact: There is a placebo effect for doctors, too."