Think of all the people around us who are quietly medicated yet don’t share their states, so the rest of us might not know what’s running through them even if we suspect alterations. We, here at addanomadd’s Johnson & Johnson silo, gain from those functional dependencies. Pills seem to prolong life and reduce pain, such that their shapes exist as the pharmaceutical industry’s choice of prescription rather than letting victims fade away naturally. Because the little suckers are small and fit in your purse or pocket, they’re costly prized pellets or even almost-bullets. Consumption leads to increased production, and production leads to greater profit. In this edition of addanomadd, the writers assembled mostly personalize episodes taking pills in solitary settings that individualize experiences; however, for our editorial letter, we’d like to go public with pills as bombshells. That’s right: Dynamite! Picture an arsenal of pills falling from the sky, launched or dropped from drones governed by “pilots”—pill poppers (acting like anonymous lab technicians in white coats whose faces are covered by masks so as not to contaminate chemical components)—grounded ”pilots” assigned to remote video game stations with no face-to-face encounters with the throats of those who swallow the explosives. Industrial empires rely on necropolitics for expansionist pulsations. Consequently, governments benefit from the war industry by manufacturing weapons that kill soldiers and plenty of civilians but also wound survivors who then need pills to “recover” from injuries. These veterans of the barrage get directed to pills for salvation, and, after being released from hospital wards or asylums, hit the streets as zombies who either disappear as walking dead extras or return to clinics where the medical industry benefits from their addictions.  Hence, if it weren’t for fornication and bloodshed, we, this odd species of ours, wouldn’t be here on planet Pill. Pills as threats, or pills as treats?  We get to decide… when we prepare to imbibe another capsule.

~addanomadd’s Johnson & Johnson