Well, thank God the Vioxx debacle only means that a lot of people are merely dying! Can you imagine how much worse it COULD have been? Rather than just suffering from a minor inconvenience like DEATH, millions upon millions of people might have experienced a little (gasp!) EUPHORIA by taking such evil drugs as opiates/opioids. We should all get down on our knees and thank the powers that be that doctors are scared to death to prescribe drugs that actually might RELIEVE PAIN! We should give our most humble thanks to the drug companies, the government, the DEA and all the other institutions that hold our best interests as their primary concern.

But, PRAISE BE, we still have access to Celebrex, APAP, and a multitude of NSAIDs that only destroy our livers, hearts, kidneys and stomachs and might be discovered to be long-term deadly, just as Vioxx has been.

We must not be blinded by the fact that opiates have been effectively used for thousands of years as one of the world's least toxic analgesics. We must put our TRUST and our FAITH in the blessed pharmaceutical companies and we should happily look forward to the next batch of lethal compounds they'll over-charge us for so that nobody will EVER have to actually feel GOOD when they take something for their chronic pain.

Let us pray.