One of our first stops when we arrive back in the United States is always the local pharmacy. We want to be prepared for anything. We have been in France, which is rich in pharmacies of a sort. There are some 22,000 of them, each one marked with an illuminated green sign, and they have a virtual monopoly on the sale of medicines, all the way down to aspirin. If you are familiar with American pharmacies, the French version looks and feels like an entirely different kind of business. A few personal care products are up front, where you can examine them, but everything else is hidden behind the barricade of the counter, manned by pharmacists who claim to have the answer to your medical problem, whatever that may be.
Foreigners have two issues with the French pharmacy system. One is that you have to know what you want before you want it, which means that you have to diagnose yourself and prescribe yourself a cure, and translate all this into French before you even step through the door of the pharmacy. The second problem is that French pharmacies are so rigorously dedicated to health that they make you feel quite ill, even if you’re not.
Our local pharmacy on Long Island, by contrast, sends a much broader and more welcoming message. It’s certainly not all about health. Most of one side of the store is occupied by shelves piled high with sugary drinks and high-fat snacks, while the central aisle is almost all chocolate and candy.
Right at the back, so far back that you don’t even have to look at them if you don’t want to, are shelves containing thousands of over the counter medical products, and the pharmacy itself where you can get your prescriptions. If you have vague and indefinite symptoms of something or other, as most of us do, you can spend a happy hour browsing the open shelves and collect any number of products that might or might not help your condition. Nobody will scold you for getting it wrong: it’s a free choice, you can make your own medical mistakes.
On the way out you can pick up a few candy bars, high-fat snacks and sugary drinks to steady your nerves. It’s a wonderful confusion of health messages – we can sell you the problem, says the pharmacy, but we can also sell you the solution. The management is obscurely aware of this contradiction, which social scientists call cognitive dissonance, the ability to keep two opposite and incompatible ideas in your head at the same time. We see a lot of it in politics. Until last year you could also buy cigarettes and tobacco at the front of the pharmacy, a kind of last gasp before exiting into the fresh air. Now there’s nothing up front but anti-smoking devices, plus some more candy.
Apart from that small concession to common sense, the pharmacy feels like coming home. We could live there, and perhaps we do in our minds. The greeting card section tells us what we should be celebrating, and the medical section tells us what we should be afraid of in every season: allergies, colds and flu, insect bites, indigestion and so on. There’s a remedy for everything, and there you have it: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness all in a single big box store. That’s what makes America great!
Copyright: David Bouchier
