Last week I undertook a grueling journey to the strange and primitive country called PharmaLand, and in particular to one of its larger provinces, known as “California” to the natives. In this country, every inhabitant is sick with some disease — or multiple diseases, in many cases — and many of these diseases are imaginary. The natives believe that they will die if they do not regularly ingest or inject magical elixirs prepared for them by priests of the god Pharma, the primary deity of that country.
In many cases, the natives do not show any disease symptoms, but they regularly take tests (also devised by the Pharma priests) that tell them they’re sick. Thus everybody in that country is also taking magical elixirs. But from what I could tell, most of the time these magical elixirs don’t actually work and the natives continue to be sick.
The natives I spoke with include the following:
A 91-year-old on medication for bone marrow disease. This was probably the only case I saw where the magical elixir actually seemed to work.
A 40-year-old taking multiple elixirs for high blood pressure and diabetes.
A 29-year-old taking magic happy pills (known by the strange name of “Prozac” to the natives) for sadness. This person’s cat is also taking the same happy pills, though how it was determined that the cat was sad was not explained to me.
A 39-year-old also taking happy pills.
While I was in this remote province of PharmaLand, I got sick with some kind of bad cold. I was asked to take a test to determine if I had a disease that the natives are particularly afraid of, which I will call The Worst Disease Ever. I replied that I wasn’t very sick, that I’d had this before, that I’d recover quickly, and that the test was obviously designed to make me feel afraid and willing to take a magic elixir.
A few days later, one of the natives I was visiting also came down with a similar bad cold while attending a kind of multi-day meeting known to the natives as a “retreat”. But this native took a test that said the cold was actually The Worst Disease Ever, despite the fact that this native had previously taken multiple magical elixirs that were supposed to stop The Worst Disease Ever. The rituals of PharmaLand demand that a native attending a “retreat” who gets a positive test must isolate, not be allowed to mingle with others, and not be given food. This native, despite not being very sick, was determined to ingest another magical elixir called “Paxlovid”, that was supposed to do what the previously ingested magical elixir failed to do.
In short, in the strange country of PharmaLand, natives continually ingest magical elixirs for real or imagined diseases, and when those magical elixirs fail, the natives simply take more magical elixirs in the false hope that one of them will eventually work. After a week, I managed to escape back to my home country without being forced to take a magical elixir or test, but it was a close call.
My understanding now is that the cult of Pharma-worshipping has been spreading quickly to other countries. My advice is to be prepared for this and not be swayed by the priests of this dangerous cult.