July 3, 2006
The Straterra (ADD med) makes me feel too amped and outside myself. I was supposed to increase my dosage to 40 mg on Saturday, but 25 mg seemed plenty intense for me. As for friendly feedback (requested last week), here’s a typical reply:

“Your blog now seems much more focused . . . but also, unbelievably, even more self-absorbed.”
—Charlie Waters

Tomcat Bell and three of his fellow camp counselors from Orme Ranch came down on Saturday night and spent the night with us. I made them pancakes yesterday morning and we sat around the kitchen table and read the Straterra “Adverse Events” disclaimer. You know, that long scroll of fine print that comes wadded up inside the capsule box that nobody ever reads except the lawyers who wrote it and the lawyers looking for a payday.

Kathy started it all by casually remarking, “Did you know your father is on drugs?” Since T. Charles and his fellow camp counselors are all Psych majors they wanted to know about what I am taking, and this led to reading out loud the “Common Treatment-Emergency Adverse Events Associated with the use of STRATTERA in Acute (up to 9 weeks) Child and Adolescent Trials” table. A graph on the backside compares 340 participants who actually took Strattera with 207 participants who thought they were taking Stattera but were actually taking a placebo. As Kathy began reading these we howled with laughter at the absurdity of the human mind.

• 20 of those who took Strattera reported abdominal pain, while 16 of the placebo crowd had the same reaction.

• 11 Strattera takers experienced vomiting and so did 9 of the placebo takers

• 27 of the Strattera ingesters got a headache, while, not to be outdone, so did 25 of the placebo crowd.

• Only one of the Strattera fraternity got dry mouth, but two of the placebo takers reported dry mouth.

• Three of the Strattera patients got influenza and so did one of the placebo drug addicts.

Someone actually got the flu from taking something that has nothing in it! Oh, what a lunatic world.

I stopped taking the Strattera yesterday. Better to be swirling than to be high on swirling.

”Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
—Chief Dan George in the movie Little Big Man