My Prescription

www.thephobialist.com lists
Pharmacophobia as a Fear of taking medicine and/or the Fear of drugs.  I
wonder if I have that.  I can take cough syrup and things like that, but
sometimes prescription drugs (such as sleeping pills, etc.) worry me.  I
have a fear of getting an addiction because I think I'm susceptible to addictive
things.  I know my mother was addicted to sleeping pills a few years back
and somehow I'm the only one in my family not to be --at some stage in life-- a
heavy smoker.  I think my mother quit when I was around 6 years of age. My
father quit when I was 18 (he quit cold turkey the day he retired). My sister
smokes 3 packs a day, just like her husband.  I feel sorry for my nephew.I
was a Coca Cola addict (but now cut back to 2 cans a week).  I used to have
a gambling fixation (but now just get a lottery ticket when it hits $5 million
of more).  My worst one (and cost me a job once) was an addiction to the
excitement of opening a pack of trading cards.  Seriously!  I worked
in a trading card shop and saw how excited people got when they'd open a pack
and find the card they were looking for or some special card or signed
card.  I loved it.

One Christmas, I had bought a pack of cards at a gas station and got a card
worth nearly $100.  Working in a card shop, I sold it to a customer (and
was nice enough to give my boss a 20% 'finder's fee' for letting me sell it in
the store).  A friend came in looking for the last few cards in this set
and told me he'd been buying packs at the nearby 7-11.  I told him we most
likely had all the card he needed so to stop wasting money on the packs. 
Coincidentally, I was in the 7-11 that week and noticed there was one pack left
in the box.  I bought it and sold a signed card from the box for $400 2
weeks later.  So I had, between the two cards, an extra $400 spending money
that Christmas.

But the addiction started that Christmas and I found myself testing my luck for
the next year or so.  It wasn't until the following Christmas that I first
realized my problem when I'd had a quiet night and with a new shipment of
product in, found myself opening nearly $300 in packs (and got nowhere near that
in saleable items).  But then it became a daily fix and I couldn't stop
myself.  It was a bad Christmas for sales and in January I found myself (my
co-worker too) out of work.  I loved that job and it took me nearly a full
year to find any confidence in working again.  And it was a good way to cut
cold turkey.

But now I'm having people tell me to get some sleeping pills.  That I need
them to get back to sleep. 13 hours' sleep from Sunday night to Thursday night
is entirely unacceptable and I know it's true.

But I don't want to take sleeping pills.

Alberta has told me there's an herbal supplement that may help, so I'm going to
look for that instead and hope it's not addictive.