Fallout Pills

An ad offering "Anti-Radiation Pills'' caught my eye in the classified section of The New York Observer last week. It was listed under "Health, Beauty, and Bodycare," and it made my heart pound with a curiosity that was at first wholly contemptuous. Who doesn't love a good snake-oil story?

I called the toll-free number and left a polite message saying could somebody please call me back and tell me what anti-radiation pills are. I love bizarre products, especially when they're conjured up by mass emotions and contemporary fears. I love America more than ever then, for being all at once so industrious, so hopeful, so faintly demented. Anti-nuclear pills? I was picturing them neon-green. Something out of 1950s Superman.

That same day I read about the margarine that yells at you from the supermarket shelf, and I thought about a nuclear attack, and how utterly incongruous this hollering fake butter product would be in the midst of it, yelling "Butter! Butter!'' as our civilization blows up. If you want a good epitaph for America, maybe it would be the fact that this defiant margarine would probably survive a nuclear attack.

But I digress.

The next day I received a call from Chuck Fenwick, founder and head of Medical Corps?an organization that teaches emergency medicine to civilians. The pills have been in use since the original nuclear age, and they are apparently entirely sound, and, as far as they go, quite effective. "The most dangerous element of a nuclear blast is the radioactive iodine,'' Fenwick explains. "These pills are basically good iodine, which prevents your thyroid from absorbing the bad iodine.'' Fenwick, a veteran of combat medicine who teaches a three-day civilian medical course in Ohio, also serves on an antiterrorist task force. "Your thyroid," he explains, "is (1) stupid, (2) a pig and (3) runs on iodine. In case of an imminent nuclear event, these pills will block your thyroid from absorbing the bad stuff, and give you time to evacuate. After Chernobyl they used this stuff in Poland and Sweden and drastically cut the number of fallout deaths.''

Fenwick is one of many entrepreneurs selling survival products via the Internet, but he doesn't exploit excessive fear, nor does he charge much. A bottle of his KI-03 pills (a version of another product on the market called K-I pills) sells for less than $25 and will protect an entire family, he claims.

Just this month, as the first "dirty bomb'' plot came to light, Westchester County officials offered to dole out free iodide pills to anybody living within 10 miles of Indian Point, which is 140,000 people. Close to 3000 stood in line to get their pills.

The deeper question here, for me anyway, is more philosophical than pragmatic: To what extent should we go on about our lives, and to what extent should we be taking the possibilities of extinction to heart?

My close friend Peter Olsen, an ectomorphic Dane who is so tall his head seems to receive higher frequencies, said the smartest thing I've heard when the first dire warnings about a nuclear attack hit the covers of Europe's tabloids last fall. "You can't think about it," he said, "because then you can't live."