Permission Slips

I remember another episode revolving around my great milk dilemma in kindergarten.

Being a bright boy, I had an epiphany in regards to the chocolate stuff – I could kick in the 10 cents difference out of my own pocket, join the chocolate-mustached bourgeoisie and leave the plain milk proletariat behind. My beloved Gram gave me a shiny quarter each week, so the funding was not the issue – I could easily afford the silver Roosevelt dime. But alas, my chocolate dairy dreams were not to be.

As smart as I was, the powers that be at my humble elementary school were smarter still. They had seen most every trick in the 5 year old playbook, and they knew how to keep an upwardly mobile snip like me in my place. If I wanted chocolate milk, not only did I need to cough up 35 cents each week, I had to present a signed permission slip from my parents. Downtrodden and a little more world-weary, I resigned myself to a life of plain milk.

Grown now, I have gladly put the days of signed permission slips behind me. Or have I? It occurs to me that Doctor’s prescriptions are really just another signed permission slip, albeit on fancier paper with messier penmanship. What a prescription really says is, in laymen’s terms:

Dear Mr. Pharmacist:

Please allow Billy to buy this drug.

Sincerely,

Dr. Jones

I wonder if my Kindergarten snacks would have been different if the Dairies started direct marketing to the teachers at my grade school the way that pharmaceutical companies market to physicians today. If this had happened, I am sure EVERYONE would have chocolate milk – heck, I bet a lot of us would have been chugging down milkshakes at snack time!

OK, I am NOT saying that requiring doctors’ permission to purchase potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals is a bad thing – far from it. But it is essential that we start to look at things from a different angle – without and predetermined prejudices or conclusions.

Ask any building contractor – before you rebuild, you gotta do some demolition work. And demolition is not for the sentimental. And it can be messy.

Yes, we have to take a sledgehammer to some of the things that we now hold sacred, strip them of the false
Facade that we’ve built up over the years, and expose the bare bones of our health care system. Once we can study them, we can decide what stays and what goes, and start our rebuilding from there. And yes, its gonna get messy.

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