Back when Nixon declared a “War on Drugs”, George Carlin joked that the real drug problem in this country was that on every corner you’d see a big, glowing red sign that read: “Drug Store”. Nowadays they’re all corporate pharmacies—a little less overt—but I’ll tell you what remains the same: everyone you see walking down the street is on pills.

Every college student, day-trader, lawyer, pilot, and trucker you meet has an odd gnarl to their jaw as they tell you, “without these 60 mg extended release Adderalls, I wouldn’t even be able to function!”

Every nurse, social-worker, DMV employee, and starving-artist-slash-barista I know is on antidepressants. When you’re restocking bird seed at Home Depot instead of working on your novel, a little Prozac helps numb that nagging in your heart. Even my mom’s cat is on SSRIs. Guess she’d been watching too much CNN.

And everyone who’s ever experienced any difficulty in their life—fender bender, someone didn’t like your Facebook status, Mercury’s in Sagittarius—all those things that cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—you’re gonna need a bottle of Xanax for incidental use. Any time you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable about yourself, it’s best to have some Benzos handy.

Every construction worker’s got a Oxycontin script. Every dentist and balloon-twister can get you a tank of Nitrous.

And then of course you have the Red-Pillers who all take the Blue-Pill. The Men’s Rights Activists who for some odd reason need a piece of boner gum to keep their philosophy flowing. Many of these same douchebags also cycle testosterone patches. Apparently, dude thinks his veiny shoulders will distract you from the fact that he’s 5’7″.

How did we get here, where everyone’s got their own chapter in the DSM, and every psychiatrist has a Pez dispenser filled with Ambien? Clearly there’s a lot of money in drugs (just ask whoever gets the thousands of kilos of white powder Coca-Cola removes from the coca leaves each year), and clearly we Americans are no lightweights when it comes to crushing up pain pills with credit cards.

But aren’t we risking some danger here, that soon we’ll be nothing but mobs of medicated zombies, arguing on the Internet? Back in grade school we read Brave New World and there was something in there about the population being controlled by a government-manufactured pill called Soma, but I don’t remember what happened at the end. My Adderall wore off.

Legend has it that Mark Twain was undiagnosed Bipolar, and Charles Darwin was a Major Depressive. They say Marylin Monroe had Multiple Personalities, John Nash (who gave us Game Theory) was Schizophrenic, and they even say Charles Barkley has ADHD.

The new buzz-word is “neurodiversity”, and for once I might be on board with it. After all, if there was a medication that made us all look the same, we’d probably say it was racist. So why take a pill that makes us all think the same? Y’all got Pfizer stock, or what?