Fidgety in school? Shy in crowds? Feeling blue? Tired? Can't sleep a full eight hours every night? Get a little annoyed from time to time? Trouble focusing at work?

Just can't exercise or eat right? Don't have time for your period? Prefer one pill a month for bone health rather than daily calcium? Eyes a little dry? Can't get it up? Have to pee while out playing golf or rowing on a lake? Ate too much garbage for lunch?

Unless we retreat to a cave with no media access, we can't escape them -- ads for prescription drugs are in our face the minute we pick up a magazine, fire up the Internet or watch TV, especially the network news. Pill vendors are pushing their product day and night.

More than half of all Americans are now taking at least one prescription drug; the most common are for cholesterol and high blood pressure, according to Medco Health Solutions, but a whole slew of new pharmaceuticals covers an ever-expanding range of diseases and conditions, some real, many made up.

The Mad Men still exist! Those clever, empty people on Madison Avenue figured out the perfect catch phrase to sell more pills -- "Ask your doctor." And so we do. And then the doctor hands us a prescription (easier than an argument) and the pharmacist hands us an orange vial and the pharma companies laugh all the way to the bank.

Most of the time, I do believe, the whole system is playing us for suckers and we are falling right in line. And heck, if our insurance company will pay for it, and it promises to fix some annoying problem, why not? It's better than eating oatmeal for breakfast to lower cholesterol or changing our lifestyle to reduce stress. Right?

As with snake oil salesmen of the past, who sold bottles of useless and sometimes toxic elixirs to unsuspecting men and women in small towns across the United States, we find it hard to resist the lure of a quick fix. We often laugh when we see these characters in old movies -- we like to think we're smarter than our grandparents and great-grandparents and wouldn't fall for the fancy huckster. But the sad truth is, we're not. In fact, we may be a whole lot more dumb.

Truth is, we've lost all common sense. We forget there's a price to pay for everything.

Yes, I know there are people whose lives are saved by the drugs they take. And yes, there are people who really do function better on their meds. But I'm not talking about people who really need them. I'm talking about the rest of us.

The pharma industry feeds on the prevailing view in our society that anything that might compromise our efficiency, productivity and 24/7 happiness is a condition or disease that can and must be treated. As that market approaches saturation, the next step is to fabricate novel conditions and the drugs to treat them. Pills are the little workers designed to keep our inner factories in tip-top shape. Or are they?

A few examples from my own humble life.

Some years ago, I went to see a new gynecologist for insomnia. She immediately gave me a script for the antidepressant Paxil and rushed me out the door. I took the things for about five months and while I did sleep a bit better (which may have been a placebo effect), I felt very flat and lifeless the whole time -- the pills had robbed me of my fizz. Quitting was terrifying; I was nauseous and anxious, fell over if I tried to stand up, and hardly slept for a few weeks. When I called her office in a panic, her assistant blew me off and essentially hung up.

The good doctor, who had so blithely prescribed these pills, had seemingly forgotten about me by then.

Recently, I went to see an orthopedist for muscle cramps caused by overdoing it at the gym. The ache had persisted for months so I finally decided -- against my better judgment -- to ask a doctor. He immediately ordered X-rays from his own in-house equipment then diagnosed me with degenerative disk disease.

I was shocked and dismayed. He prescribed one set of painkillers for daytime, even though I told him I had no pain during the day, and another set for night, when the ache would start up. I got home, looked up that diagnosis on the top health Websites, saw that the symptoms did not resemble mine in the least and realized that this was his standard response to every complaint -- a vague disease and a stack of painkillers.

I never took a single one, and before returning them to the drug store read the long list of side effects. Heart attack and stroke were the two biggies. I don't remember the rest.

Doctor knows best? Despite Congressional attempts to curb undue influence on MDs, many physicians are snugly tucked into the pockets of Big Pharma, handing out at best useless and at worst highly addictive and potentially dangerous drugs like penny candy.

Through my own trial and error, I determined that my muscle aches were aggravated by a magnesium deficiency -- I wasn't getting enough from my grocery-store supplement and so turned to powdered mag, which took away the ache in a few days. I also discovered that powdered magnesium helps me get a better night's sleep. For pennies!

We all know people, mostly the elderly but increasingly the middle-aged, who take many pills a day, and if you ask these otherwise intelligent, well-informed people what they are for, they will tell you they're not quite sure but that the doctor told them to take them. And once they're on those pills, they're afraid to go off. They're hooked on their pharmaceutical cocktail for life. And, as we all suspect, half of the drugs simply treat the side effects of the other half.

Fortunately, I was too young to have been part of the mass ingestion of hormone replacement therapy, back when menopause was a disease, but I had already decided I would resist what I heard was huge pressure from doctors to just take the pills and shut up. I know many women today who are now worried that they will be among those who get the cancer or heart attack or stroke they would otherwise not have fallen victim to, all because they took a drug they really didn't need.

Having worked as a freelance writer for the pharma industry, I can honestly say that many of the ordinary people who work in it -- from operations to IT to communications and even to marketing -- don't really know what their company is doing, and that they would never ask the hard questions. They can't afford to.

They want to believe that what they're doing is for the good of humanity and, in some cases, it is. They're well-trained and good at their jobs; they're also paid well enough to buy a big house, send their kids to private school and take nice vacations. Many are proud to hand out business cards from a corporation on the Fortune 500 -- they also have some of the best health insurance money can buy.

But they work their days in silos, knowing little about how their tiny sliver of the business might have contributed to the researach, development and marketing of a drug for restless leg syndrome or overactive bladder or erectile dysfunction or even low testosterone, now called Low-T syndrome.

And one wonders about the fake people in the commercials; I used to occasionally hire actors for gigs when I worked in New York -- I know how tough finding that kind of work can be, and how much they can get paid for pretending to have sexual problems or osteoporosis or depression or acid reflux or even an enlarged prostate.

Then there are the actors who should know better, like the cheerful and ubiquitous drug peddler Sally Fields. As it turns out, her monthly osteoporosis pill (I won't write the name because even bad publicity is better than no publicity in this industry) costs a whole lot more than the alternatives -- and drives up the cost of health care in this country -- but because The Flying Nun is shilling it, women line up in droves.

Most drugs hawked in the media today are new to the market -- the idea is to create a blockbuster as quickly as possible, pushing out the competition and establishing the brand before it goes off patent and is replaced by generics. Many of these new drugs have yet to be completely tested for safety and efficacy, as we saw with some pain killers and other drugs that actually killed a good number of innocent people before they were finally pulled from the drug store shelves.

Where was the FDA when we needed them? Also in the pockets of the prescription drug cartel?

I finally couldn't write drivel for the pharma industry anymore and quit, even though it meant giving up a six-figure income. But the minute I said "No" to an assignment for the last time, I felt a rush of wonderful new vitality and health and energy course through my veins.

Now that is a drug I can live with.

A few articles and books:

Study Shows More Americans Taking Prescription Drugs, USA Today

Disease Mongering: Good for Big Pharma, Bad for You, by Andrew Weil

Medical Editors Push for Ghostwriting Crackdown, New York Times

The Truth About the Drug Companies, by Marcia Angell

Our Daily Meds, by Melody Petersen

Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All into Patients, by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels