There’s an old saying that, "You can’t have too much of a good thing". Well, that rather depends on the thing. For children, this is free-flow ice cream. Yet, no matter how enjoyable something is once in a while, the idea of eating it all the time is enough to produce vomiting — those of you with children will have experienced projectile vomiting after they have ignored your advice and eaten too much ice cream. The reality is your enjoyment of something is greater when you have the chance to anticipate a pleasurable experience. The other saying at work here is that, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder". You appreciate something more when you do not have it.

The numbers are just in for the number of prescription written by US doctors in 2009. This gives us the chance to worry about how many pills we are popping and whether we are popping them for the right reasons. And, guess what! We have more or less the same result as 2008. The inconvenient evidence continues to flow in. We are popping too many drugs to control anxiety and depression. If you look at the banner on this site — last year, doctors wrote 44 million prescriptions for it. When you add up all the pills represented by these prescriptions, that’s more than enough pills to give several to every person in the US (both legal and illegal). Now take a moment to absorb the implications of this number. Let’s ignore the fact this is 17 million more prescriptions than the next most popular anti-anxiety drug. If you were to add in all the other millions of prescriptions written for anti-anxiety drugs, every household in the US would have a bathroom cabinet full of pills. But the chilling thought is the number of people who now buy their drugs online without a prescription. Being realistic, online pharmacies sell drugs more cheaply than you can ever buy in your neighborhood pharmacy and everyone with an overstressed household budget now looks to save money wherever possible. Once you add the guess to the actual numbers, the flow of drugs into US households is remarkably high.

It’s impossible to imagine we can all be so anxious or sad. The only explanation for this excess is we have been conned by Big Pharma. In 2009, the pharmaceutical industry is reported to have spent $4.5 billion on advertising its drugs. That’s more than the budget of several European countries (not counting Greece). Wherever you look, you see the brand name xanax. It becomes impossible not to identify the brand as for the treatment of anxiety. Unfortunately, it’s a good product. It really does control anxiety. So word-of-mouth pushes the demand for xanax ever higher. The result is clear. The population of the US is overmedicated. Even though xanax should only be prescribed for the short-term treatment of serious anxiety disorders, we take it routinely for a range of different conditions. This is a time when too much is too much, and it really is something we should all be worried about. We are rapidly becoming a county dependent on drugs to keep us going. If politicians try unsuccessfully to convince us that we are too dependent on oil imports, imagine what would happen if they tried to tell us not to take as much medication. There really would be a riot (just like Greece).