Inventor’s Rant about Litter on Lawn Inspiration for Curmeon
Pharmaceutical marketing experts predict that a new drug to treat curmudgeons will quickly gain wide acceptance and could someday rival anti-depressants like Prozac and Zoloft in market share.
Curmeon, from Cotswald Laboratories in Baltimore, gained Food and Drug Administration approval earlier this week after an advisory panel hailed the drug as “a significant new tool to improve the level of personal and public discourse in an increasingly fractious society.”
Neurologists and psychiatrists have enthusiastically embraced the new drug, saying they will quickly put it to work treating the growing number or curmudgeons that plague American society.
“I’m seeing more and more curmudgeons in my practice and I think Curmeon will make a significant difference in their quality of life going forward,” said Dr. David Schneiderman, a noted Philadelphia neurologist and psychiatrist.
The explosive growth of curmudgeons in American society is blamed on the aging of the baby boom generation. Physicians like Dr. Schneiderman report that troubling numbers of usually well-adjusted baby boomers become ever more irascible, irritable and prone to unexplained vituperative outbursts and rants as they age.
“Just last week, I had to listen to a fifteen-minute rant from a normally mild-mannered male patient about drivers who don’t keep their car windows clean,” Schneiderman said. “A year or two ago, you would never have seen this kind of behavior from this man. It’s all a factor of his increasing age.”
Dr. Schneiderman said he expects his patient’s curmudgeonly outbursts about things like dirty windshields to completely disappear after he begins taking Curmeon.
Indeed, Curmeon owes its very existence to an intransigent rant about neighborhood children throwing candy wrappers on the lawn of Baltimore inventor Edwin Cotswald. The inventor, who owns Cotswald Industries and its pharmaceutical subsidiary Cotswald Laboratories, carried on at length to his wife about the lawn litter and neighborhood children in general.
“I finally had to physically place my hand over Eddie’s mouth to get him to stop with the candy wrappers thing,” Gloria Cotswald recalled recently. “I said to him, ‘Eddie, you’re becoming an old curmudgeon. Why don’t you invent something that would make curmudgeons like you just shut up and sit down?’”
And so he did. The result was Curmeon.
Following the FDA approval, Cotswald Laboratories said it will soon roll out a network television advertising campaign, with Curmeon ads aimed at the evening network news broadcasts, like ABC’s “World News” and NBC’s “Nightly News.”
The newscasts are an evening staple of fifty- and sixty-something viewers. As a result, they are dominated by advertisements for incontinence and erectile dysfunction drugs.
“It will be very pleasing to me personally to see Curmeon ads on ‘World News’,” Cotswald said. “You don’t have to watch many of those news programs to guess what Cotswald Laboratories’ next blockbuster drug will be: a single pill that tackles both impotence and curmudgeonery.”