Pfizer Markets New Wellness Drug

n a move that market analysts hope will save Christmas for the pharmaceutical industry, American drug giant Pfizer has launched a new marketing campaign this month to promote Heroin™, the company’s revolutionary new “wellness� drug.

Pfizer’s first ad, aired during a particularly painful recent episode of Joan of Arcadia, opted for stark minimalism, featuring a still shot of a satisfied Heroin™ customer, slumped over a very clean toilet, married with the slogan “Heroin™: The Other White Powder.� In addition to establishing their brand in the marketplace, this first ad served to differentiate Pfizer’s new product from rival Glaxo-Wellcome’s Angel Dust™.

Other early ads, run during football games, select MTV programs, and really sad chick flicks, have also been deliberately vague, aiming to raise brand awareness without mentioning the medication’s effects, enabling Pfizer to sidestep governmental regulations requiring pharmaceutical ads to disclose all of a drug’s side-effects. This tactic is especially shrewd with a product like Heroin™, since it’s tough to find a nice way to say “back-alley cocksuck� or “deadly constipation.�

While some consumer advocates have complained in the past that such direct-to-consumer marketing is predatory and harmful, drug companies like Pfizer argue that it’s actually very profitable.

“When there’s just some spaghetti-spined M.D. standing between customers and our products, consumer education becomes more important than ever,� contends Pfizer spokesperson Dennis Tanner. “Consumers shouldn’t have to trust that some kooky doctor is looking out for their best interest. They need a name they can trust, like Pfizer.�

Heroin™ is being marketed as a revolutionary “wellness� drug; one that Pfizer claims will “knock aspirin on its ass� and “make Prozac look like dogshit.� Rather than prescribing numerous non-Pfizer drugs to treat an array of patient maladies, the pharmaceutical giant hopes doctors will turn to their new wellness drug as a cure-all, one that leaves patients with a euphoric sensation of well-being, regardless of whether they are suffering from general anxiety, cancer, or baldness.

“That’s the miracle of Heroin™,� explained Tanner. “It doesn’t matter what’s wrong with you. From erectile dysfunction to agoraphobia, Heroin™ makes it all better.�

Due to FDA hang-ups regarding such a revolutionary new treatment, Pfizer has opted to avoid the usual years of getting-monkeys-high testing usually necessary to release a new drug. Instead, the drug giant has followed the lead of Merck’s Crack™ and AstraZeneca’s LSD™ by bypassing the usual established network of doctors and pharmacists, and is offering the drug through a network of authorized Pfizer representatives nationwide.

“Heroin™ will not be available in stores, but instead through a special network of independent distributors. It’s sort of like Amway,� claims the company’s latest ad. “Ask your dealer about Heroin™.�

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OH MY GOD SNOW

Sweet, sweet Nancy: Another year passes with us, and we enjoy the grandest of all dates on the calendar—Valentine's Day! Oh, blessed Valentine, saint of all things love-oriented. No single day stands more important to me than his day, which should explain why I always forget out anniversary. I save my mental energy for love day. Valentine's.

Centuries ago, when the Roman gods and their saints still walked the earth, St. Valentine bowed down to the people, who were as big to him as chihuahuas are to us, and said, "Let one day stand as a testament to the greatest gift of all that I've given you—love." I may be paraphrasing. I read it all in a book. But that's the kind of love we have—exact quotations aren't necessary.

So we celebrate the day of Valentine's, this giant of a saint, in our favorite traditional way: dinner for two at T.G.I. Friday's. Appetizers of potato skins and mozzarella sticks set the tone for the evening. As I give you the last mozzarella stick out of the basket, you know it's not because I dislike the taste—if anything I'm the one who loves mozzarella more, between the two of us. But that's not the point. I would sacrifice the mozzarella stick if cheese were the very thing I breathe, in some sort of parallel universe of cheese-breathers, and the mozzarella stick were some kind of tiny scuba tube for breathing. It's probably not enough cheese to really breathe for much longer, but you understand my meaning. Also, you don't breathe cheese. Does that grab you by the throat? I would sacrifice my life just so you could enjoy the taste of cheese. I'm serious about it.

The truth is, I do not even like T.G.I. Friday's all that much. I would rather eat at Tango's Barbecue, or perhaps at Domino's, and get take-out to celebrate our love at home, in our bedroom and living room, and perhaps later in the kitchen. But fate cannot be roped around the snout and directed around by us mortals. We met at T.G.I. Friday's that fateful New Year's Day, when they refused to serve me any more alcohol. You came to my rescue that day, as you have come to my rescue ever since, inebriating my heart with your love so I do not need quite so much alcohol as I used to. And that's why T.G.I. Friday's is so sacred to me, and why it still turns me on when you wear the uniform in the bedroom.

Would that I had the power—that I were a man with all the powers of the universe, or at least handy at carpentry and masonry. I would build us a temple to represent all the things our love is to us. Pillars, twenty-feet high! A throne for you and you alone, rising fifteen feet high, so high you could not even sit in it, and quite pointless indeed. But you could stare on that temple from whatever higher point you are at, and realize that I, Chals, have built you that temple just to look on. A temple so big the building code people would likely condemn it for being too big, and possibly a fire hazard, depending on what I built it from. I'm thinking stone, but I wouldn't be adverse to wood, if it were cheaper.

Nancy, isn't this love bigger than the both of us? Would you have me spend next year's Valentine's Day at T.G.I. Friday's alone? The "threesome" suggestion was only a joke. I never would have asked that waitress if I knew you would take it so seriously. Please, come back. Your mother keeps hanging up the phone on me.

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I woke up the other day, took a look around and was hit with one shocking ass-wiper of a realization, people: We live in one giant fat-assed country. I turn around for five seconds and all of a sudden everybody looks like they just stepped straight out of a family reunion in Wisconsin. I don't know what the hell happened while I was used-car shopping, but it looks like the inmates have taken over the fat farm.

I met a guy down at the DMV the other day who told me he's suing KFC and Burger King for making him fat. I shit you not! Don't get me wrong, it's not like I don't think he's got a good case. Because believe me when I tell you that this motherfucker is fat. Some people gradually get fat when they're not looking, others pack on the pounds while they're testing how little physical activity they can get away with in life. Not this guy, though, he's go-for-broke, may-the-biggest-ass-win fat. I mean like "Sizzler takes down the All You Can Eat Shrimp sign when you see him coming" fat. All he needs to do is waddle his big ass into the courtroom and there's going to be no further witnesses on that subject. They may even just settle right then and give him the cash so he doesn't take his jacket off. The whole "proving you're fat" issue that has tied up other lawsuits of this kind is a total non-issue for this guy.

So, he's halfway there. But the problem is, I don't think his case is ever going to make it to trial. Because those fast food titans are some wily folk, smarter than you'd think from the people they hire to work in their restaurants. And they learned an important lesson when Big Tobacco was dragged into the courtroom and had their pants pulled down. See, whenever somebody tries to sue one of those places for selling them the quadruple bacon cheeseburger that broke the camel's back and triggered their thirteenth heart attack, the fast food guys don't panic. They just bide their time, and file a motion here or there, inconspicuously delaying the trial month after month. Eventually they drag out the lawsuit long enough that the plaintiff invariably dies one of those spectacular heart-exploding deaths before the case can go to court.

And you know that Big Tobacco is jealous as all get-out, but unfortunately for them, it doesn't take some poor bastard forty years to die from a Whopper. The fast food companies can play the waiting game and just plain outlast the tubby malcontents, while they sip on their bottles of spring water and ride their elliptical trainers on into the new millennium.

But don't think for a second that I'm one of those smug bastards with the metabolism of a greyhound that's just looking to cash in on America's miserable obesity. Because believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, Omar Bricks was once a fatass himself. At the age of nine I discovered the joys of whipped cream straight out of the can and before you could say "saturated fat," I was one bulbous, sticky-faced little porkpie. I was teased mercilessly at school, at home and at the beach, and I almost didn't finish grade school since I was so busy pulling retaliatory pranks on all of the skinny little assholes that made my life a rotund living hell.

But this is where the inspiring message comes in, fat Americans. By the age of twelve I had hit rock bottom and I would eat anything, including White Castle burgers. They called the burgers "sliders" back then, and I'll leave it up to your imagination to figure out what that meant, since this is a family website and all. But my point is that when I hit the bottom of my last can of Spray-Whip and there was nothing but cold gasses left, I made a promise to myself that Omar Bricks would never be fat again.

And you know what? It wasn't easy, but I kept good on that promise. It probably helped that I picked up a tapeworm off a White Castle burger around that time and lost about fifty pounds in two weeks, and I haven't been able to eat anything containing meat or grain since, but the point is that I did it. And there's nothing to say that the rest of America can't do the same, assuming that the world's supply of tapeworms isn't dangerously low at the moment or anything freakish like that. I'm not sure where you'd go to find figures on that kind of thing, but I bet the odds are pretty high that somebody out there's some kind of expert on the subject.

So get on it, boys and girls. Omar Bricks knows full well that no diet plan works for everybody, but with a little trial and error I'd bet hard cash money that there's some combination of enemas, tapeworms and bulemia that will turn the trick and punch your ticket back from fatasshood.

Best of luck! Bricks out.

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