Lorri, my traveling companion, speaks scarcely a word of the local Furrin. But this morning she was able to walk into a pharmacy, raise her glasses, display an allergy-swollen eye, and walk out with a cream that would have required an $80 doctor visit in the U.S.

Testing the system, I went into two pharmacies and showed a card on which I had written (courtesy of FreeTranslation.com) a request for a certain other pharmaceutical. I gave its generic name and all the brand names I could find online. In both cases, women behind the counter identified the drug by its generic name and offered me all of it that I wanted to buy.

It’s a harmless substance, mild, quite useful, with few side effects. But it’s one that the U.S., in the iron-fisted wisdom of its bureaucrats, has also placed behind that “make an appointment and pay $80 or $100 first” gate.

Here, such meds (in fact, nearly all meds, including cough syrups and garden-variety pain-killers) are on shelves behind counters. But ask for them and they’re yours. No prescription. No ID. No signing of police registers. No computerized databases to tell the government what you’re taking. No risk of being busted if you buy some quantity that a local legislature has arbitrarily defined as “too much.”

Our friend in the last town told us about bringing another American, a physician’s assistant, into such a shop. The newcomer pointed to one med after another, horrified: “That one is highly addictive. That one? It’ll stop your heart if you take to much. That one …”

Our friend interrupted her to wave toward the busy, vibrant street scene around them. “Yes,” he said, “and look. Nobody’s dropping dead on the pavement. Addicts aren’t waiting in dark alleys to mug you. People are making their own decisions about their own health. And it’s working.”

Sigh. Yes, it works. But do we have the slightest hope that the “Land of the Free” will ever believe we’re grown up enough to take care of ourselves?

I’m not saying every un-American thing here is for the good. In the Big City we saw too many starving alley dogs and cats. Too many beautiful landscapes are blighted with litter. In places, the poverty is hideous. I really, really, really got creeped out when our bus was halted for a passport inspection. Drivers all over the land tend to treat traffic rules as something more like guidelines. (But even that has a freedomista aspect: Children drive down the road on motorbikes and ATVs, and as long as they drive reasonably well, nobody cares.)

But now we’re in a town that’s cleaner than many. Thanks to a larger-than-usual population of Europeans and Americans, there’s even an active animal-rescue group. The drivers here … well, at least they don’t appear to be deliberately aiming at us. There’s good food, good shops, and about half a dozen pharmacies where people are free (and I use that word advisedly) to buy stuff that most of you, dear readers, are forbidden to purchase without a permission slip and a great big whack in the pocketbook.

—–

Sorry I’ve been offline a bit. Our charming hotel room is supposed to come with free wifi. The first night, it did. But the network went away the following morning and nobody seemed in any great hurry to do anything about it. Since then, they’ve rebooted their router. But even though they speak English here, they don’t have enough tech-talk for me to convey that their Internet provider seems to be down, or their system isn’t connecting to the ISP.

In any case, I’ve had to locate a stray wifi network from which to post this, and the signal is very unstable. So we’ll see how the rest of this week goes …

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Practical Freedom, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.