Behind the Counter: The Reality of Psychiatric Drugs in Unregulated Pharmacies
By Lameese Smaili on October 17, 2024
Imagine this: a pharmacy where you can walk in and the person behind the counter gives you any drug you need for any ailment you describe. It sounds convenient right? What if I told you I nearly lost my life to this system? I bet you’re a little more hesitant now.
At the age of 19, I moved thousands of miles away from my humble home in Canada to a little village in the mountains of Lebanon. I was always impulsive, and ditching my education and getting married seemed like the right thing to do at the time. My parents were furious.
Of course, new beginnings are always dreamy and whimsical in theory. I was starting over. I was going to carve a life out for myself. I would embrace this culture, with its poverty and beauty and simplicity. I promised myself I would.
credit: Lameese Smaili
And I did. But when you are far away from everyone you know and love, it’s a blessing to have someone kind enough to embrace you as well. Unfortunately, I never found that kindness no matter how hard I worked to get it. Instead of getting basic treatment for depression, I was thrown into the darkest hours of my life.
The first psychiatrist I saw did not assess me. He instead allowed others in the appointment with me to speak for me while I sat awkwardly to the side. They spoke over me every time I tried to get a word in. I left the office with a prescription for antidepressants. One week later, the doctor wrote up another prescription for Xanax because I called to tell him I was having heart palpitations.
Having grown up in a sheltered home, I didn’t know anything about Xanax. Xanax is a “benzo,” and it is used as a sedative and a tranquilizer. Doctors today are very hesitant to prescribe it because it is highly addictive and dangerous. The government of Canada has it listed under “controlled and illegal drugs”. By the second month, I was taking 3 to 4 pills at a time, sometimes several times a day. I was able to escape into my own drowsy world, far away from the cruelty of the one I lived in.
But even in my sedated state, I was “too loud”, “too opinionated”, too “Canadian”, and that meant I was mentally ill. By this time, I didn’t have the mental clarity to understand that I was being drugged into submission. When I became tolerant to the drug, I was taken to another doctor who did not study my previous file, and instead prescribed several more psychiatric drugs along with my Xanax, some of which were addictive, others of which interfered with one another. And so the cycle began.
Lebanese pharmacies are a business. I like to compare them to a little supermarket. You can walk in, describe your symptoms, and the person behind the counter will give you something. Out of a medication and don’t have a prescription? You don’t really need one. They’ll give it to you. You have a sore back? There’s a needle for that. Jump into the back room and they’ll administer it. And no records are kept.
credit: Unsplash
I was now seeing multiple doctors who did not read or review each other’s files, and I was becoming more and more confused with the symptoms I was experiencing. Of course I didn’t know that the drugs were interfering with one another. I eventually found myself taking more than 35 pills a day. My body developed an immunity to the drugs and every time I saw another doctor, the dosages were raised. I dreaded the moment every morning and every night when I needed to take out the pill container and fish out an assortment of colorful pills for me to take. At night, my nerves were all over the place and I could barely lie still in bed. My body had a mind of its own, and that mind wasn’t connected to me. I was miserable and afraid and lonely. I felt like an empty shell.
One day, I woke up to use the washroom and was alarmed by the sight of myself in the mirror. I had become painfully thin and my eyes were sunken. I didn’t recognize myself. My teeth hurt, my face was numb, and I realized I didn’t remember much from the previous days. In fact, three days had passed. A paper on the mirror confirmed that I had been in the hospital but was not treated. A phone call to my doctor confirmed I’d experienced a drug-induced seizure and that the drugs had hit my kidneys. I was told later by family that, somehow, I had continued waking up, dressing my children up for school, feeding them, and taking care of them. I don’t remember anything from those days, but a mother’s instincts sure are strong.
In third-world countries such as Lebanon, pharmacies bring in medications from all over the world. According to an anonymous representative interviewed by L’Orient Today:
Pharmaceutical companies that sell their products in Lebanon have representatives, or salespeople, who visit pharmacists or doctors in hospitals or private clinics and attempt to persuade them to prescribe their product. While many doctors prescribe their patients medicines based on their effectiveness, some act less ethically, accepting gifts, paid trips to international conferences or other forms of bribery from pharmaceutical companies.
https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1236592/pharmaceutical-drugs-in-lebanon-explained.html
A few weeks after this seemingly never-ending nightmare, I was on a plane back to Canada where doctors were baffled by the long list of prescription drugs I was ingesting. They started the long painful process of clearing them from my system. I never returned to Lebanon. This time, I wasn’t making an impulsive decision. I was starting over. I was carving a life out for myself. And this time, I was embracing myself. Thinking back on that experience three years later, I realize I am a lucky survivor of an unregulated health care system. Crawling back out from the bowels of death was not easy, and I am forever grateful to be in a place where the little normal things in life are truly a blessing.