A person was given powerful painkillers when they got hurt. Later, they were taking calming drugs, regularly, during therapy. Unfortunately, they became addicted to both. The ones that prescribed the medications now had to help the person to be weaned off of them.
(( Note - one of the big reasons there was a major addiction to drugs like oxycontin and other painkillers is due to them being over-prescribed, sadly.)) -- Anon Guest
[AN: No worries, OP, I have witnessed several "miracle drugs" being handed out like lollies at a kids' party]
They called it Mercy, and it was the hot new thing. The best painkiller in history. The best painkiller in the world. Its gimmick was that the sufferer could not overdose. More than a few had tried and failed. They didn't even make themselves sick. They just woke up the next morning after a really good nap.
They even woke in a better mental state than they were in when they tried to overdose.
Some started calling it Miracle, owing to its effects. It acted fast, and took pain away to the point where it was negligible. If an injury needed rest, then the patient taking Mercy would be inclined to rest. Physiotherapy was no longer torment to the people who needed it.
They didn't realise what the trouble was until it was almost too late.
Profits were high. Demand was enormous, and only growing.
Someone in the lower tiers wrote a memo of alarm when they discovered that once someone started using Mercy, they used it for the rest of their lives. Once a day at minimum. Four to eight times a day. Some went through a bottle a week.
The shareholders loved that. They didn't understand what the problem was.
The memo-writer insisted that Mercy was addictive. Dangerously addictive.
That employee was fired when they started making noise. Then the medicorp that made its money from Mercy ran through the usual D's of business: Deny, Delay, Distract, and Derail.
It worked really well until the disaster of the Narvik Maru.
A cruise vessel beset with delays that kept it at sea longer than it should have. They had food and drink enough to last the ordeal, but the first thing to run out was... Mercy.
Those who took the most Mercy were the first to snap, attacking those who needed less. The violence took two days to escalate into murder. The storms prevented supply deliveries for two and a half weeks.
Only thirty people survived to reach port. Of those, over half had done it by barricading themselves in their rooms with a hoard of food. Withdrawals had made them claw at their own skins. The ones who were not locked in were shambling horrors, remnants of humanity found wandering the halls. Literally willing to kill anything they caught.
It was a PR disaster for the medicorp responsible. Share prices plummeted.
The only thing that stopped them from complete ruin was the threat of what would happen if they stopped making Mercy.
[Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash]
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