Popular Cholesterol Pills Now Made of Broken Glass

A generic version of the widely-used Liptor anti-cholesterol drug is being recalled because the pills are full of “glass particles,” which we guess is a bad thing? People take so many pills!

And you know how the generics are always a lot cheaper, and who cares because it’s not like the brand of the medicine is something you care about? Well, one reason these particular pills are cheaper is because they come from some sketchy factory in India — far away from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which does a pretty lousy job of protecting the food and medicine supply right here in the United States. For instance, one of the worst recent cases was an incredibly disgusting and filthy Children’s Tylenol factory where “undocumented bacteria was living in the vats of drug ingredients” in Philadelphia.

Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals Inc. has recalled dozens of lots of its generic version of cholesterol drug Lipitor because some may contain tiny glass particles, the latest in a string of manufacturing deficiencies that once led U.S. regulators to bar imports of the Indian company’s medicines.

Americans take so many prescription drugs. It is kind of amazing that we, as a people, can live for nearly a hundred years on a diet of Costco ribs and 2-liter bottles of corn syrup, all because we ingest a staggering amount of pills from the age of 28 or so until we are finally dead, seven decades later. For example, most Americans are high on “synthetic heroin,” right now.

The Guardian examined our American appetite for prescription dope, and came up with some appalling information:

Americans make up less than 5% of the global population but consume 80% of the world’s supply of opioid prescription pills. Sales of the drugs have increased more than fourfold in the past 10 years, grossing $11 billion annually. To express that figure more personally, in 2010 enough [opioid pills] were handed out by doctors to medicate every American adult with a typical dose of hydrocodone, a pure opioid as powerful as morphine, every four hours for a month.

Is this the “prescription drug benefit” people like John McCain always talk about, when they briefly pop up from a mid-morning nod out?