Well, at Least You'll Die with Nice Skin

I feel the need to comment on this article.

I took this drug for 5 months (considered a full treatment) back in 1997 with amazing results. It truly did work wonders. It was a strange drug to be on, though.

In no particular order, here are some of my observations about this medication:

• It's an acne medication that came in pill form. That was strange in and of itself, but the pills were huge. My best friend started up on the stuff right after I did and I remember us joking that they were some kind of horse pills. These things were a chore to swallow.
• I had to have blood work done on a weekly basis for the first month, then biweekly for the remainder of the treatment. I don't think I realized it at the time, but that had to be some pretty powerful shit to warrant constant monitoring of all of my endocrinological functions.
• Follow the instructions on the packaging or else that shit will fuck you up. Every individual pill was sealed with a notice to not take the shit if you were pregnant. That didn't really apply to me, but I still got the picture. Two of the biggest rules of the medicine, though, aside from not getting knocked up, were to always take the pills with either a meal or a glass of whole milk, and not to go out in the sun for any extended period of time. I broke both of those rules and paid for them in turn.
  
• Taking the pills without a substantial amount of food or milk in your stomach resulted in the pill being digested to quickly. I could literally feel the thing pop in my stomach. The rush of medicine would fuck up my equilibrium and I'd either have to sit down or risk falling over.
• I went out in the sun for too long towards the beginning of the treatment and ended up with the most awful sunburn I have ever experienced. The treatment initially draws out all of the acne under the surface of the skin before it makes it all go away. The sun reacted with this and gave me a blistered and peeling look for about a month.
• This shit has some strange side effects. I was fortunate enough to only be stricken by the what I would consider the good side effects; namely, weight-loss and a heightened immune system. Another friend of mine got jaundice from this stuff and had to be taken off of it. Apparently it's also been known to cause schizophrenia in some cases and make patients more likely to commit suicide.

Bottom line is, this is some freaky shit. When it works, it completely eradicates acne, but it's a risky venture. Some of the more severe side effects hadn't yet surfaced when I went on this stuff, so I elected to take this stuff with relative ease, but I'm not sure that I'd do the same today.