What happens in Vegas…you can blame on Restless Leg Syndrome?
So I was just watching an ad for Requip, a big-name drug for Restless Legs Syndrome. Here’s one of them…
Restless Legs Syndrome, or “RLS,” as they’d like you to start calling it, is still highly disputed in terms of legitimacy, but the very vagueness of the symptoms and the difficulty of diagnosis make RLS a marketing director’s dream. Every hypochondriac with a TV is a potential target, and indeed, when you hear about a disease described only with sketchy terms like “creepy-crawly sensations” and “restlessness,” it’s pretty damn hard not to get sucked in yourself.
But whether or not this condition actually exists, much less affects 10% of the U.S. population, as some claim, the drug ads are annoying as shit. And this one had to have been the weirdest one I’ve seen, because right in the middle of the small print narration, right after the disturbing revelation that test subjects experienced trancelike episodes while driving, the narrator says that you should contact your doctor if you begin to have uncontrollable urges for gambling and sexual activity. Gambling and sexual activity?!
If this disorder really affects 10% of the population, and we assume (however naïvely) that the people taking all those millions of pills the drug companies are selling actually do suffer from RLS, then am I the only one who thinks things are about to get a lot more interesting around here? Imagine 30 million people — 30 million! — strung out and rampaging around Las Vegas and Reno and all those casinos on American Indian reservations with authentic-sounding bullshit names. Plus, they’re horny! Horny and spontaneously addicted to gambling. Good thing casinos and hookers are like peanut butter and jelly in this country. They just go together.
To top it off, one of the supposed causes of RLS is alcoholism, so barring the remote possibility that the RLS sufferers responsibly stop drinking when they start taking the pills, they’ll probably be drunk when these sudden urges to join a craps game or proposition a transvestite sex worker, which will weaken their resolve even further, guaranteeing them a night to remember.
But hey, at least their legs stopped feeling weird.