Does This Mean Stallone Will Be Banned From Competitive Acting?

"Nothing is over! Nothing!" -- John Rambo

Among the many things Sylvester Stallone and I have in common must be counted a very limited talent for acting, aging flesh and the desire to self-medicate. The last, alas, cost Stallone fines and court costs amounting to around $13,000 after a guilty plea in Australia to possession of 48 vials of the human growth hormone Jintropin and four vials of testosterone.

I, by contrast, only wanted some antibiotic eye drops but ended up instead with a lingering eye infection and several unnecessary trips to an opthamologist.

Stallone, like several other old lions of his generation's action hero stars (notably, Bruce "I see old people" Willis's soon released Take the Blue Pills and Die Hard, or something like that), has been racing the reaper to complete his valedictory outing as Rambo. While his recent Rocky Balboa wasn't nearly as bad as I, in my affected and uncredentialed role of Constant Viewer, expected it to be, there was still something mildly bathetic about the sixty year old Stallone lumbering into the ring for one last round. Well, time and tide and all that.

"I will not be without these. I cannot be without these," Stallone said when discovered with the goods, and I can well understand why. Why the hell should he be without them? If the man is vain enough and deluded enough to want to pump himself with steroids and such to play the heroic lout one more time, I say more power to him. It's his career and his life, fergawdsakes!

And by the way, while Stallone's geriatric action heroics are easy to ridicule, Stallone is a very good screenwriter and director in his genre and the original Rocky easily deserved its Oscars as much as any of Frank Capra's legendary melodramas ever did. It is worth remembering that Stallone became the third person ever to be nominated for both acting and writing in the same year for Rocky, following Chaplin for The Great Dictator (1940) and Orson Welles for Citizen Kane (1941). Call that declining standards, if you will, but that's pretty damned good company. So, also, Bruce Willis turned out to be (or become) a much better actor than his Moonlighting mugging or early John McClane machismo would have led me to believe.

Anyway, enough of this Hollywood hoopla. Let's get back to the real topic which is drugs and me. (Me! It's all about me!) Being both lazy and stupid, I left a pair of extended wear contact lenses in for too long and ended up with an infection in one eye. Now, I admit it might not have been a mere infection. All sorts of things could have been wrong with my left eye, but an infection was by far the most likely problem, it having happened to me before and the prescribed treatment being antibiotic eye drops and refraining from wearing contacts for a while.

As it happened, being lazy and stupid and knowing I was due for an eye exam shortly anyway, I did nothing and, as will more often than not happen, my immune system kicked in, my eye felt better though not entirely well, and I decided to just leave the contacts out and wait until it was time for the regular exam. Now, had I been able to run down to the pharmacy to buy a bottle of antibiotic eye drops in the first place, the infection would have healed faster and that would have been that. Of course, as I said, it might not have been a bacterial infection, in which case the eye drops would have done no good (but no harm, either) and I would have known to seek medical attention at once. But you can't buy antibiotics without a prescription, dagnabit!

I know, I know. Antibiotics abuse is a public health problem, and some people are allergic to some antibiotics and so on and so forth. But if you can buy topical antibiotic creams and soaps and if you can buy tetracycline for tropical fish, ferchristsakes, then you damned well ought to be able to buy antibiotic eye drops without a prescription.

When I finally saw the doctor some weeks later, he noted the still mildly infected area and guess what? He prescribed antibiotic eye drops! Plus, of course, a couple of return visits to check the course of the treatment -- treatment which I could easily have self-administered weeks earlier at far lesser risk to my eye.

Okay, so I'm stupid and lazy and cheap and physician-resistant, as well. But they're my eyes and I don't need or want to be saved from myself. Or, if I do, it still isn't the business of the state to do so. (Who, oh who will save me from the state?) If I want to run the risk of self-prescribing the wrong medication, it's my own lookout. Yeah, I know. Literally, in this case.

Same with Stallone. If it's that bloody important to him to have one last fling as an action hero and it takes controlled substances to permit him to do it, why the hell should Australia or the U.S. or any other state prohibit him from doing so?