Apocalyptic Apothecary

by Ron Foster

  “You organized any raiders yet? I kind of put that sort of thing at the bottom of my priorities and I already got my hands full telling my folks they need to stay off the streets and out of abandoned places.” Zack responded knowing military-like emergency appropriation was well within the skill and mindset of this decorated veteran soldier.

  “Yea, but I need to bitch at you about stealing my security forces away by having Knobby and Nick moving in with you at your camp! I got plenty of folks with the itch to do that sort of job but you snuck away my two best men. I am like you, though; I am also having my share of problems with folks not heeding my warnings about doing that kind of shit that will get you killed at the moment. Things are still pretty hot and confrontational you might say on the streets if you’re not prepared for a well-armed excursion.” Sloan said explaining modern folks didn’t take too well to trying their luck hunting and gathering the old way when something up the road might need looting instead in their uneducated and unprepared minds. A lot of those old buildings had become traps for the unaware.

  Zack understood that this was a precarious and dangerous idea that he was considering undertaking with Sloan to go running and gunning. However, he also counted on the masses of formerly wealthy, heavily medicated, older gated-community folks who would buy his already bottled wares. That option sounded better to him no matter if they knew he made his potions or not. That would get him out going on that mission for now and he was sure that community would spend whatever they had left be it a bunch of loose change or green money first. Money was merely tokens anyway now but that didn’t mean that it didn’t have value.

  ‘You seen Rod around lately?” Zack asked.

  “Yes, he makes it down here pretty regularly to visit. Matter of fact, you picked yourself a good day to come around because he is supposed to be here in about a half hour. You wanting to see him too about selling your cure all?” Sloan asked.

  “It ain’t called cure all, it’s called “Heal All!” I know that it sounds similar and all that, but names are very important here. Healing up something is different than getting cured. That is the plants’ actual name and it got it not by chance or for some quacks marketing plan, as some will infer. I see that look in your eye! Don’t even think of calling me a quack, whether you’re joking or not! Folks got to believe in their medicines and expect reasonable results. We need to work on getting community buy-in on this concept that I am working on, and a bunch of doubting Thomas’s which I am sure we already got plenty of, need to be informed. Now then, as far as I know, I am the only thing we got close to a pharmacy that is still manufacturing anything, if you want to look at it that way. Folks will be getting all kinds of symptoms, both real and imaginary, as soon as they take that last big pharma drug they got that those pill pushing doctors prescribed for them. Those bastards supposedly give you one pill for this or that and four others to counteract the side effects of the first one they gave you. The reason being their synthetic cure causes more problems than you had to begin with! They charge one hell of a price for all that medically regulated poison too! Costs a lot of money to keep the lawyers rich and the people medically addicted as the new changes their body goes through changing prescriptions so another drug store can open on every street corner. Shit, Sloan, you are an old bastard just like me, we both can remember when a town might only have a couple of drug stores to service everyone for miles around. Now you got three different ones at an intersection, with a grocery store across from them that’s got its own pharmacy trying to compete with them! I tell you it’s a shameful self-perpetrating racket, but that isn’t what is going to be anyone’s problem anymore. What their problem is now going to be is the shock to their bodies when it goes into clinical withdrawal from all those synthetic prescribed drugs that they have been taking to make them pee, take a crap, regulate their blood pressure, etc. If you got a better solution for what they should do besides just cutting their pills in half and trying to wean themselves off that shit, then I am all ears. That’s because I want to hear what they are going to do next myself when you’re at the end of your meds!” Zack said pointing out that just the thought of running out of medication would stress out many folks enough. The added stress would cause them to sicken and die faster, regardless of how nutrition and formerly regulated symptoms and constantly adjusted prescriptions played a role in their overall health to date.

  “I see your point Zack. Unfortunately, though, this modern-day religion of pharmaceutical crutches our society has embraced has pretty much became a chemical cocktail of dependence and financial and physical ruin of overpriced woes that modern medicine and the insurance companies have stuffed down our throats for years as “necessary.” I never was one to trust a doctor much and I can tell you more than my share of horror stories but lots of people like my momma and grandma always thought that anything that comes out of a doctor’s mouth was gospel and they fawned over them money-grubbing sons- of-bitches, no matter how much or as many times they didn’t get it right or I and others said they were no good! Tell you what, I will help you any way that I can with this project, that is if you can guarantee me best as you can that stuff won’t cause anybody any harm and be sure we are actually doing people some good.” Sloan said extending his hand for a shake.

  Zack accepted his hand gladly to seal the beginnings of a mutually beneficial hopefully profitable deal and explained to him that as far as he knew and as his research showed, there indicated that there were no known recorded human allergies to the herb or interactions with common pharmaceutical drugs. There was a caveat though, folks on blood thinners might want to exercise some caution at first. Hell, that rat poison warfarin crap a lot of people were on wouldn’t even let you eat most green healthy leafy garden vegetables except in small quantities once in a while and then you had to be sure to have another small serving of the same damned thing just to be sure your metabolism could balance out. That was crazy as hell for Big Pharma to make a drug like that when even schoolkids learn that the dinner green stuff a lot of them hate like spinach, turnip and collard greens, kale etc. was some of the best stuff in the world to eat to insure good health and longevity.

  Once you started down the path of getting a fist full of prescriptions and pills from those hypocrite Hippocratic Oath takers, you were not going to get any better most times, if you had something called an old age or heart condition, in Zack’s opinion. He avoided doctors like the plague and said his blessed good health was because of that! It always bothered him that at any age if he had to go see one, the nurses at any kind of doctor’s office always looked at you incredulously if you said you weren’t taking any daily medication for something. The nicer more observant ones also included a question maybe about any herbal supplements, not that the fact that they were more prevalent and common these days, but that he thought that data was just to give the doctor a clue in his “Practice” of medicine to switch you to some kind of chemical the drug manufacturers said was good for something and they could get a kick back from the generic or trade name on it, or add it to their retirement plan residuals by taking stock options while not willing to take it themselves or prescribe it to friends and family.

  Zack was totally and vocally against so called corporate medicine having had his own bad experiences with uncaring, bottom line, money-oriented doctors. Unfortunately, what he had in mind as a business model, he was ashamed to say, was pretty much the same structured thing when it came to making a buck off something this go around.

  “You know, Zack, we already took up most everybody’s money long ago to contribute to the community pot to feed them all so far. I don’t see how you are thinking about profiting much at all off these old sad sacks around here. What else do you have in mind?” Sloan asked.

  “I got a proposition to try and I was thinking that I needed your sharecropper and military insights first before we talked to Rod also. Now, we are all trying to survive around here individually dealing with what’s going on in this grid down situ
ation and figuring out different ways to scrape by while getting our feet wet doing it. It is extra tough on everyone because, so many things in this new life are unpredictable. Health is one. Never the less, I am studying both of you all for some smart shit you can maybe introduce into your leadership positions that I can copy and trying to figure out my own personal course to chart while I get an angle on having the best of all worlds. Now tell me if I am wrong about something, Sloan. I need you to tell me something before we maybe try to suck the islands owner, Bobby, into my master scheme. Didn’t sharecroppers not too long ago have to depend on the old man’s or boss’s money, as I used to call it, in order to get doctoring on the farm if they were working for shares? That was part of the gig and part of the deal, as I understood it, between the tenant farmer and landowner. Wasn’t such a bad deal really, although it was added to your yearly bill, the medicine or whatever usually wasn’t withheld as long as you could work the land and make a crop, right?” Zack asked.

  “Yea, that arrangement was usually dependent on how you were valued as a worker, exactly what was wrong with you, and what deals with the local doctor could be cut to keep expenses down by the landowner. Tell me if I am wrong or on the wrong track here, are you saying we should try to get Bobby to invest in you and stock up on your medicines in the company store or something? Hell, it’s hard enough for us to find enough light work for some people now as it is, to justify us feeding them, but if you get us charging them for medicine also and getting waivers for sick leave or something, we ain’t got nothing but a cemetery of old fools and unpaid bills.” Sloan objected.

  “I might have already been thinking about some lighter more profitable work for those folks to do and they would be working to make some of their own medicine themselves, if you hear me out.” Zack said, pausing the conversation momentarily and getting a wry smile.

  “Folks always need something constructive to do to earn their keep. I got that; I welcome hearing you out on that subject in particular. The sun is rough and unforgiving on old men and women and I am sorry if half of them look like these days they would be proud to be able to work a whole day, let alone get out of bed next day and do it again. But even the more fit and healthier ones are going downhill fast. We are going to be using our younger or stronger folk in weeks, I am sad to predict, and say most likely to just to dig holes and bury those folks trying to just drag themselves along and weed non-producing gardens. That will mean unfortunately we don’t have the more fit folks working the fields or hunting the woods for food to keep diddly shit functioning and that will cause even more work to do and more depression. It’s all or none nowadays, bro, it’s kind of like the reasoning on why all militaries use ball ammo to kill each other with. Yea, hollow points and fragmentation bullets kill better but it takes more people and resources to treat one wounded soldier than it does to bury one. It takes two men to carry one off the battlefield, it takes a whole communication and transport team just to move them to aid, it takes the quartermaster corps just to keep up with logistics to get the bandages and medicines etc. to the front plus ocean shipping, home front manufacturing etc. to even ensure a soldier has confidence that he will get help if he or she engages the enemy to give them confidence in care and medical treatment to aim at the enemy better. The same way confidence with working the field rain or shine in a sharecropping life goes. That statement means that a person knows that the entire family’s health is taken care of, medicine can be bought, food gets on the table and bills can be paid. You all on the outside of the dirt farming system might think that working the shit out of somebody to make a crop is important just to get a dollar, but if the workers don’t last long enough to plant or harvest, it is going to take you down quicker by neglect than the whimsy of nature and the weather, bud.” Sloan said having studied the matter in his mind best he could.

  “I admit I don’t know frog squat when it comes to this plantation thing you got going on over here, Sloan, or why in the hell some people choose it as a lifestyle other than outright dire necessity to just eat. But the thing is, these folks got their life essence flowing out of them now as sure as their dumb asses accidently will put an axe in their knee by not knowing it was a wet day and that the axe’s bit would skid off the log dangerously if not careful. I hope nobody has had any tragic accidents lately you all couldn’t take care of.” Zack said wondering why his advisories and admonishments that the woods were usually safe if you opened your senses and warned yourself about safety, you might be ok. Otherwise, if you were not used to doing something, then lose the pride and ask someone who knows before trying it yourself!

  Zack was the kind of a guy, as well as Sloan, that was always taught to never let history repeat itself when it came to understanding why the world was so messed up or just planning on not having the same problem reoccur in the future. “Folks got two ears and one mouth and God made people that way for a reason”, Zack was noted to say.

  This fact reminded him that he also sometimes applied sayings or observations to his botanical studies. The doctrine of signatures, dating from the time of Dioscorides and Galen, states that herbs resembling various parts of the body can be used by herbalists to treat ailments of those body parts. Zack decided while they were waiting on Sloan to tell Rod more about the main ingredient (Heal All) in his Panacea Blend, that he wanted to get it distributed to the sharecropping survivors first, as well as holding some of it back for the wavering residents of the gated community.

  That was, not until however, Zack placed his ace of diamonds card on the table.

  "Like werewolves and vampires, bacteria have a weakness: silver.”

  Rod was already well aware of the fantastic alleged benefits of colloidal silver for pretty much everything and Zack said he would fill Sloan in on some of the finer details of it but suffice it to say it was part of the genius of his mixture. You see normally tinctures were made with alcohol or glycerin as a base. Not so Zacks modern formulation of using the finest grade laboratory produced commercial colloidal silver he could find, but also at a concentration that far exceeded anything that could be reproduced until the grid was back up and a true source could be identified.

  Zack began by reminding Sloan to mention people had touted this plant as a natural remedy for a variety of health conditions for a long time, because prunella vulgaris (Heal All/ Self Heal) contains a number of anti-inflammatory compounds and vitamins (including vitamin C), something everyone was needing in their diet these days to stave off even just a cold that the plain colloidal silver water didn’t have.

  Self-heal has many common names, most attesting to its reputed curative powers. Hook-heal and sicklewort come from someone’s fanciful notion that the flower in profile resembles one of these tools and a mishap with one would require it. Others noted the flower’s resemblance to a mouth and throat, concluding (according to the doctrine of signatures) that it should be used to treat ailments of those parts. The unlikely name carpenter’s herb reflects the herb’s alleged power to “join together and make whole and sound all wounds, both inward and outward.” It could be said it was also called this because splinters, cuts etc. occur regularly in a carpenter’s trade and need tending to.

  Self-heal is an herb. The parts that grow above the ground are the parts used to make medicine.

  Zack had brought along one of his herbal books and showed Sloan a page listing a lot of the collected wisdom of historic as well as modern applications for this unique gift from nature. He told Sloan it was necessary to know all this information because if he was going to sell it, he had to know all about it because people would have questions.

  Self-heal internally is used for inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis), diarrhea, colic, and stomach upset and irritation (gastroenteritis). It is also used for mouth and throat ulcers, sore throat, and internal bleeding. Some people use self-heal for HIV/AIDS, fever, headache, dizziness, liver disease, and spasm. It is also used to kill germs (as an antiseptic), loosen phl
egm (as an expectorant), and tighten and dry skin (as an astringent). Self-heal is applied directly to the skin for vaginal discharges and other disorders of women’s reproductive systems, as well as for wounds and bruises.