“Quality of life.” Just what the hell does that mean, anyways? Quality of living, or quality of being alive? To some, it is more important that you are alive, just living and breathing and eating and shitting, than it is that you have a functioning life to live. I personally believe that how you are able to live is just as important as the fact that you can. This news story about cancer treatments reminds me of how our culture is increasingly placing more importance on a pulse and less focus on the actual quality of your waking hours.

Do I want to live? Yes, most of the time. But to me, death is preferential to becoming a bedridden slab of breathing meat, kept alive by machines or medication. The hilarity of it is that many of your drug companies are very upfront about the side effects of their most popular medications and people still sign up for them. Who wants migraines when they can be migraine-free with only minor side effects like diarrhea, dry mouth, acid reflux or some other equally-annoying by-product of your “medicine”? If the cure is only slightly less bad than the disease, is it even worthy of being called a cure at all?

For-profit drug companies are not trying to cure diseases. There’s no profit in it. These places work to cure symptoms. Cancer got your skin all pale? They’ve got a drug for that. Are you so unhealthy, as a man, that you can’t get excited enough to perform in the bedroom? Forget addressing your poor heart health, bad cholesterol, and sedimentary lifestyle. Pop that blue pill and give it to her, big guy, you half-healthy stud! Even the drugs for the big tickets like blood clotting, high blood pressure, and heart disease all come with side effects that rival the worst day you can imagine for yourself. Why? Because cures make disease go away. Stop-gap relief like the stuff they peddle now? That’s addiction. That’s dependency, because when the pills go away, the disease comes back. Stop paying and you can wave goodbye to your good times.

People need to take a hard look at the drug business in this country and find out if they honestly think that we are being served by this industry. Companies that won’t invest their billions in profits back into research into real cures are not helpers, they are parasites. This isn’t to say that some hippie-minded commune of pharmaceutical companies should be set up. Yes, allow companies to research medicine for profit. But when subsidized by the government as much as this industry is, there should be more public control of what gets researched and how much of our resources are dedicated to that. You think AIDS victims and cancer patients are cheering the cure of erectile dysfunction ahead of cures for their ills? Think again.