KEY POINTS:
Can you get happiness from a pill? Maori Party MP Hone Harawira, who voted against last week's law change banning party pills containing BZP, was among those who seemed to take it for granted that you could, when he described it as "Jim Anderton's I'm dull and boring,
and if I can't be happy, then neither can you be happy bill".
So taking party pills not only makes you happy, but also fun and exciting.
Well, hey, who doesn't want to be happy, fun and exciting? If only I'd known this, I wouldn't have been so pleased to see BZP consigned to the pharmaceutical dustbin of history.
Because, really, if a pill can make us all happy, then what right has a bunch of party-pooping, kill-joy MPs to deprive us of our inherent and inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, even if it's only the chemically induced kind?
Can I get a pill to solve all my problems? It would seem so. We have the technology and the drugs, if not, alas, the inexhaustible health budgets to fix almost anything that's interfering with our pathological pursuit of fun, from those embarrassing performance issues in the bedroom, to the morning-after regrets of that booze-assisted sexual encounter of the night before.
Because, as one online ad asks, "Why have fun and then regret it?" Why, indeed.
The idea that there's a drug for whatever ails us, even sadness, is so deeply entrenched in our society that we hardly question it. It drives our burgeoning health costs, and feeds a voracious public hungry for chemical remedies to their every need.
Never mind the illicit drugs, in the US the misuse of over-the-counter pills now kills more people than illegal drugs. In fact, the tendency of Americans to pop pills to alleviate stress, anxiety or sleeplessness has become "one of the major health problems of our time", as Dr Howard Markel, a professor of paediatrics and psychiatry at the University of Michigan told the Observer last month.
Meanwhile, Britain's spiralling antidepressant use had the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg describing it as a "true Prozac nation". That wasn't to say, said Clegg, that medication had no role in tackling mental health problems, but the trend had gone too far. It "should not be the default option _ pills must not be a crutch for the wider issues in our society which cause mental health problems".
Having once flirted, albeit half-heartedly, with the idea of taking Prozac, I know how tempting those little pills are. At a low point in my life, I'd discovered that a startling number of people I knew were taking the antidepressant and that, intriguingly, it had seemed to help them lose weight, which heightened its attractiveness for me.
But my GP, who's fond of prescribing a couple of weeks in Fiji when I present with an array of stress-induced ailments, put paid to the idea, lecturing me on the inefficacy of antidepressants, and knowing me well enough to conclude that I was only temporarily sad, and looking for a painless, quick fix to something that time would cure. He already knew what a recent highly publicised study suggested: that antidepressants appear to be ineffective for people with mild depression, who in most cases would be better advised to work off their melancholy with a bit of brisk exercise.
"Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must," said Abraham Lincoln, but endurance isn't much practised in our society. So instead of seeing unhappiness as a necessary part of life _ yes, you're supposed to feel sad after someone you love has died or as a cue to change the behaviour or circumstance that in all likelihood is causing the unhappiness _ we'd rather take a pill and block it out.
We are encouraged to pursue happiness at all costs, a pursuit that is best described as the pursuit of emptiness, according to American essayist John Perry Barlow.
He sees the injunction to pursue happiness as "a toxic stupidity entirely unworthy of my greatest American hero, Thomas Jefferson.
"It is a poison that sickens our culture more wretchedly every nanosecond. I wish he'd never said it. It produces a monstrous, insatiable hunger inside our national psyche that encourages us ever more ravenously to devour all the resources of this small planet, crushing liberties, snuffing lives, feeling ourselves ordained by God and Jefferson to do whatever is necessary to make us happy."
The trouble is Americans are miserable, says Barlow. "What am I to think of my people who, during the year 2000, while feeding at the greatest economic pig-trough the world has slopped forth, ate $13.4 billion of Prozac and other antidepressants? Better living through chemistry? I don't think so.
"Of my legion friends and acquaintances who have become citizens of Prozac nation, I have never heard any of them claim these drugs bring them any closer to actual happiness. Rather, they murmur with listless gratitude, antidepressants have pulled them back from The Abyss. They are not pursuing happiness. They are fleeing suicide."
