A few days ago, I blogged about the “drug addict’s Facebook timeline”, which showed the fictional life and alternative life of Adam Barak. It was “a creative social media campaign” by media agency McCann Digital Israel. Within a few minutes of posting, I had a tweeted comment from a reader pointing out that it was totally unrepresentative of drug addicts prescribed their addictive meds. I am sure it is, but I don’t think that was the target audience for the campaign, despite how tragic any form of drug addiction can be.
I was intrigued to start reading a comment just now on the post that started:
I take 4 medicines a day for Bipolar Disorder, OCD, ADHD & Depression. I have heard MANY people tell me how bad these medications are for me. But, the problem is, I am 17 & I don’t think that I can refuse medication yet. I live in Missouri & I don’t know what the law is here on refusing medication.
It was only as I got further into the rather long comment post that I spotted the author had signed themself “medicines” and used a rather dodgy-looking Yahoo email address. My immediate suspicion was that it was nothing more than a spam and as I got to the bottom of the comment the give away appeared with a spammy link to some online pharmacy. I did a quick search for a random snippet of text from the comment to confirm and found several sites on which the exact same comment had been posted. So almost certainly pure, uncut spam. Now sliced and diced by my blog spam filter and the IP address blacklisted.