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The seduction of Acomplia is that it takes over our responsibilities. It allows us to shift control of our lives from our own conscious intentions to a prescription drug handed out to us by doctors. It is in this very mythology that the danger to Americans hides. Not in the drug itself -- it is the mythology that’s dangerous, not the chemical. The seductive qualities of this drug encourage people to release themselves from responsibility. They encourage people to disempower themselves, to shift their power to external influences. Rather than self-discipline, wisdom or education taking a role in the person's outcome, the only factor that counts, according to the mythology, is the name of the drug you choose to take.

Of course, Americans absolutely love this story. They love it because there is a great unwillingness in Western societies, but especially in America, to take responsibility for shaping one's own health outcome. In America, we like to blame everybody else for our situation. We don't want to admit that we put ourselves into the health condition we are currently experiencing. Even our conventional medical system helps us give away our power by saying that it’s our genes, not our actions, that cause chronic disease. That way we can conveniently blame our parents when we get heart disease after eating a lifetime of fried foods and hydrogenated oils.

It is a victim mentality, and it is precisely the mentality that pharmaceutical companies would very much like patients to consider integrating into their own lives. Because people who believe they are victims of circumstance always seek external solutions rather than inner transformation. And those solutions more often than not come in the form of prescription drugs.

In contrast, people who refuse to be victims look for answers within themselves. They understand that they have the ability to alter their outcomes by making new decisions, by learning new information and by shaping their lives one day at a time, in a way that serves their long-term goals.

If Acomplia is approved, will likely be a blockbuster success regardless of whether or not it actually works. It will be a financial success because people are willing to pay almost anything to perpetuate the mythology that prescription drugs can release us from a lifetime of poor decisions.

But there's more to this story! Acomplia will likely be a very popular drug, and five or ten years down the road, after tens of millions of Americans have taken it, we may begin to find some problems with it, in the same way that we found serious health problems with Vioxx, Baycol, NSAIDs and antidepressants. People may be harmed by Acomplia in ways that modern doctors and the makers of Acomplia cannot foresee. And when that happens, the very people who are taking the drug will then turn around and blame the drug companies for their problems!

Because once again, the takers of the drugs are taking on the role of the victim. They believe they have been victimized by bad genes. They have been victimized by having bad luck in getting chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. And they have been victimized, they will claim, by this evil drug, Acomplia, which has given them some strange side effects. And thus the cycle of playing the victim and demanding external recourse and will continue.

This cycle will not end until individuals in America and elsewhere around the world have a reckoning -- that the power to shape their lives and their health outcomes rests entirely within themselves. They are responsible for their health outcome. No one else can take that responsibility for them. And if they have not created the health situation they desire, they have no one else to blame.

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