The Dord of Darien

The Shocking Secret They Don’t Want You To Know!

So I’m talking to somebody today about this scare poster we have on the wall warning people that only 5% of Neutrogena products have sufficient sunscreen-ness. Sufficient for what it didn’t say, but that’s neither here nor there. The woman I was talking to was clearly taking the poster at face value and assuming it was revealing the awful truth about Neutrogena, whereas I took the angle that, hey, probably it’s been paid for by the makers of the product it’s recommending, and most likely gets its scare figure by including hand lotion and zit cream and all the other things Neutrogena makes that aren’t, you know, supposed to be a sunscreen.

That’s not the point anyhow. The point is that someplace in this I mentioned Oil of Olay, which drew me a shocked look. "Don’t you know," I was informed, "they test their products on animals?" I didn’t actually know that offhand, but it doesn’t surprise me. Frankly, they bleeding well should. I politely pointed out that I’d rather they tested their products on animals than on, say, children kidnapped from school playgrounds or whatnot, and it was politely pointed out back at me that we should all just use "natural products" that "don’t contain any chemicals" and are obviously safe and effective because "people have been using them for thousands of years."

For fuck’s sake, people, use your heads. First up, the quick one: everything contains chemicals. Everything. You, me, air, water, Earth, Wind and Fire, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and the J. Geils Band.

Secondly, and, to my mind, more interestingly, is this amazing wealth of safe and effective natural remedies that have been in use for thousands of years the reason why everyone was so healthy and lived to such advanced ages five hundred years ago? You know, when the average life expectency was around 30 years? And since they’re natural, they’re totally safe, right? Lord knows nobody’s ever died from taking Ephedra. Couldn’t have; it doesn’t contain any chemicals!

Fact is, kids, we all owe a lot to modern medicine. It’s great that spoiled first-world hippies with nothing better to do can myopically declare that we shouldn’t conduct any medical research because it’s wrong to test products on animals — I guess people who have everything still need to find something to get outraged about — but, fact is, I’m willing to bet that ain’t one of you hippies hates animal testing as much as the pharmaceutical industry does. Animal testing is a pain in the ass. It’s an unpleasant, dirty job that gives only somewhat-reliable results and gets idiot hippies standing outside your office holding strong opinions in your general direction about things they don’t really understand. But you know what? It’s all we have.

Computers are grand. No, I really mean that — in fact, I’m writing this on a computer right now. And computers are amazing and staggering and unbelievable and all those things too, but they’re not perfect. And one of the things they can’t do is tell you anything you don’t already know. Or, well, they can’t tell you anything nobody already knows, anyhow. They can do all the really hard math for you, but they can’t actually gather data. We still need work-experience grunts in lab coats doing startlingly nineteenth-century-seeming things to get that data in the first place. Maybe in the future that won’t be necessary — genomic mapping is a great step in the right direction — but we’re a long, long way away from that yet.

Which means that when you create a new wonder drug, you run the computer models, and you check for any obvious problems, such as, whoops! It catches on fire when it gets wet. Probably not the best pill ever. But once you’ve done all that, you don’t have any comprehensive information about whether or not it’s a) going to kill anybody, or b) going to do what it’s meant to. And you have exactly two ways you can gather this data:

1) Test it out on humans and see what happens.
2) Test it out on human-like creatures and see what happens first, and then test it on humans if nothing untoward results.

Option 2 is the one to bet on. It’s the best from both a financial standpoint and an ethical standpoint. I’m sorry, but I’d sooner a believed-to-be-safe drug spontaneously combusts a rat than a volunteer from the local Community College. And quite frankly, your priorities are dramatically far out of whack if you think otherwise on this one.

There is, of course, that whole issue about the "natural products are safe and effective" bullshit being a giant blob of marketing deposited directly into the hungry mouths of gullible leftists by the gigantically corrupt and cynical supplements industry, but we can get into that another time. The main point here is, hey, if you don’t understand an issue, maybe shut the fuck up for a while. Yes, I really am saying that the facts are more important than your feelings.

Yes, you can blow your Jean-Jacques Rousseau directly out your ear. You know that bit about how I’d totally kill Hitler on my trip back in time? Don’t think for a minute I’d skip motherfucking Rousseau.

July 6th, 2008 Posted by Darien | Bullshit | one comment