The Ol' Perspecter

We are excited about all the news concerning Viagra these days. We get to use arithmetic!

They say 42 or 43 of the roughly 30 million users of Viagra and the like have become blind as a possible result of their use. Additionally, somewhere on the order of a thousand sex offenders in some other states have been getting Viagra from Medicaid, even though that is stupid.

OK, so we learn that 0.143 percent of one sex offender in those states should now be blind! An entire 3/10,000th of a blind sex offender may be running around in New York State alone! At this rate, they'll all be blind in a million years, making them that much easier to hide from.

All of this is nevertheless dreadful news for Pfizer, which makes Viagra, because now men everywhere will forgo sex in order to save their vision, causing Pfizer to go bankrupt. Ha! That was a little joke of mine. Nobody is going to give up sex just to see. Still, Pfizer is worried that possible new warnings for their product might scare very stupid people, thereby ever so slightly decreasing the profits they make off the highly valuable demographic of Very Foolish, But Somehow Not Completely Parted From Their Money Yet, People.

I think, regardless of Pfizer's worries, we SHOULD warn guys that if they use Viagra regularly it might raise their odds of going blind to as much as 2 in a million, if that will help them make an informed decision for once in their pitifully ignorant, uninformed, existences.

For that very same reason, I am in favor of many other kinds of warning notices. Surely if we warn people of dangers we could only improve their lives, never diminish them. And wouldn't it be so much more useful if all the scissors we made, or that the Chinese made for us, had the words, "do not run with this product in hands - eye puncture may occur," rather than always having to rely on one's memory of one's mother? What if one had no mother? What if one had no memory, owing to advanced dementia? What if one were raised without scissors, forced to cut paper with crude razor blades, therefore having had insufficient direct prior experience with scissors, making one's parental admonitions seem purely theoretical, lessening their impact?

To take another example, shouldn't there be warnings on car doors? Let's do the math. There are 15 deaths per year per 100,000 Americans (whether they drive or not!) due to traffic accidents. That works out to around 4500 deaths per each 30 million, a lot more than 43. So maybe a warning on each car door would be appropriate. I'm thinking of something to the effect: "You are 100 times more likely to die from riding cars like this one than to go blind from using Viagra. According to 4 out of 5 doctors, dying is worse than blindness. But remember that Detroit and Toyota depend on you. Please make an informed choice."

How about warnings on warnings? "Warning, the following warning may either (1) unnecessarily alarm you, due to an unbelievable lack of ability to keep things in perspective, causing you to avoid living your life, or (2) not alarm you enough, because you've seen too many warnings already today, and due to an unbelievable lack of ability to keep things in perspective, and as a result you may very well die or at least be permanently maimed. But remember that the medical profession needs work too. Please make an informed choice."

Obligatory homeless connection: How about warnings on streets? "Warning, if you use this product as a home, you are twenty times more likely to be murdered in your sleep, while everybody else on the planet only cares whether they can take sex-enhancement pills safely. Oh, wait, you probably don't have a choice about living here. Never mind."