France vs. Red Bull, Drugs, and Pharmacies

Lately I've seen Red Bull all over the place. This curious energy drink was originally banned in France, because it contained taurine. I don't know why the government was opposed to taurine. Anyway, early this year, Red Bull developed a formula without taurine and started marketing it in France. A very short time later, the French government legalized taurine, and the original Red Bull invaded the shelves.

France has some weird rules. It outlawed taurine, but now has changed its mind. It still outlaws the sale of medications containing bismuth subsalicylate, the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol (which is why you can't buy Pepto-Bismol in France). In this last case, it seems that there was a rash of unexplained cases of encephalopathy in the 1970s in France that appeared to be caused by bismuth compounds; the government banned the sale of such compounds, and has regularly renewed the ban.

At the same time, other drugs are freely available, including ethanol, to which about one French person in six is addicted (by some estimates), and nicotine, to which about half the population seems to be addicted. And compounds containing small amounts of codeine are available without a prescription in France, such as certain cough remedies (codeine is an excellent cough suppressant) and some pain relievers (the equivalent of Tylenol II with codeine).

American visitors, who come from a country that takes illicit drugs as if they were candy, often become excited when I tell them that they can buy products containing codeine over the counter. They always seem to be looking for a way to get high. Unfortunately for them, the amount of codeine in over-the-counter remedies available in France is so low that it's almost impossible to get any mood-altering effect out of them without taking an amount that will result in toxicity from other ingredients. For example, to get high on pain relievers with codeine, a person would have to take so much that the acetaminophen in the medication would damage his liver. Thus, France correctly reasons that there is no serious risk of abuse with low doses of codeine in OTC combined medications. The only problem is that such low doses don't necessarily have much therapeutic effect, either, but presumably they help a little, and they don't hurt.

All medications in France come from pharmacies, even over-the-counter remedies that require no prescription. You cannot go into a supermarket and buy aspirin in France; you must go to a pharmacy. Pharmacies thus have a very lucrative monopoly, and since the number of pharmacies is also regulated as a function of population, competition is guaranteed to be low. And French people adore prescription meds just as much as Americans do—France is a very important market for drugs such as Valium and Prozac. When you enter a pharmacy, you often see little old ladies (the life expectancy in France is very long) at the counter with stacks of prescriptions for dozens of medications. In addition to the usual packaged forms familiar to Americans (pills, capsules, etc.), French drugs sometimes come in glass ampules that must be broken open (I guess that seems more magic and wonderful), and the French also like to package medications as suppositories, which I think is part of a more general anal preoccupation that is part of the culture (ick!).

Pharmacies are easy to find in Paris, as they seem to be on every street and invariably have a big green cross marking their location. The green crosses are usually lit and come in a seemingly endless variety of styles. The older ones just have green or blue neon flashing inside them, but new ones use green LEDs to display all sorts of flashing, abstract graphics, not to mention handy announcements on special offers, time and temperature, humidity and air pressure, geomagnetic activity, sun spots, and so on (okay, I exaggerate, but it does get pretty weird at times). I think all these electric green crosses must come from some giant Electric Green Cross catalog; pharmacies seem to compete to see who can have the biggest, brightest, and flashiest green cross outside.

In addition to drugs, over which pharmacies have a monopoly, they also sell all sorts of other health-related goods that can also be found elsewhere. The pharmacy prices are usually higher. And they sell products of questionable efficacy, including various diet aids, electronic muscle exercisers, vitamin blends, health candies and bars, and so on. The principle seems to be that as long as something doesn't actually hurt anyone, it can be sold, even if its effectiveness for its stated purpose remains unproven. These peripheral products are often advertised with elaborate displays in the windows of the pharmacy.

All pharmacies have to have an actual pharmacist running them, and they are not a part of other stores, although some are physically located in other stores (such as the drugstores on the Champs) for convenience. These pharmacists are very extensively trained. Not only are they good at recommending medications for specific purposes, but they can also identify mushrooms (because many French people like to gather wild mushrooms for the kitchen and need a way to weed out the dangerous ones) and fix minor injuries, like cuts and bruises. If you ask for something for, say, a cough, the pharmacist will immediately pull something off a shelf and suggest it, and may well continue to pull other things off the shelves until there's a little pile of different medications on the counter. He or she may also ask questions to determine exactly which product to recommend, and the pharmacist will be well informed on interactions, side effects, and dosage.

Pharmacies also sell veterinary medication for your kitty or puppy. It makes sense, since they are already handling medication for people, and a lot of pharmaceutical science is common to all species. They are also the source of things like vaccines—if you need a tetanus shot, you can get the vaccine itself at the pharmacy (with a prescription) and then have a qualified doctor or nurse give you the actual shot.

I've not been able to determine whether pharmacists may legally dispense prescription medications without an actual prescription, but I've seen it happen, so there must at least be a certain official tolerance of the practice in some cases. For example, if someone needs a certain prescription medication, like something for hypertension or some other drug with low abuse potential, and it's obvious that the person is a legitimate user of the medication who just doesn't happen to have the prescription handy, the pharmacist may sell it to him, anyway. Of course, if someone comes in asking for a thousand hydrocodone tablets and claims that his dog ate the prescription, he's going to leave empty-handed.

One way to tell if you're in a part of town occasionally frequented by drug addicts is to look at the ground around the entrance to a pharmacy. If you see lots of empty green boxes of Neo-Codion, you know that druggies occasionally pass through the area. Neo-Codion is an excellent cough suppressant available OTC that happens to contain some codeine, and opioid addicts who are in withdrawal will sometimes buy it to take the edge off their symptoms, downing an entire box of tablets or an entire bottle of syrup. It still won't relieve them of the need for a fix, but apparently it makes the wait somewhat less agonizing. Pharmacies won't sell codeine-containing products for this purpose, but there's a limit to how much they can do to control how people use the products once they are legitimately purchased—addicts may go from one pharmacy to another, buying a little bit at each of them.

Car Talk

France Télécom is still shafting me on my Internet connection, with speeds so low that I'm roughly in the same position as someone with an analog telephone modem from the 1980's. As a result, it's hard to upload posts and photos, but I do what I can.

Anyway, today, while going to the laundromat, I observed the aftermath of an accident near where I live. From what I could tell, a car had taken a left turn a little too sharply and had hit the small concrete median on which the traffic lights were mounted with the left front tire, and had flipped onto its side. I could only see the bottom of the car as it rested on its right side from where I was, but I presume the driver and any passengers had already left the car, as the police were milling about and there didn't seem to be any concern about injuries. I didn't have my camera with me (exceptionally), so I couldn't take a picture.

Oddly enough, this isn't the first time I've seen this type of accident. I saw the very same thing a few years ago at a different intersection, only I actually saw it happen. It was rather bizarre to see the car bang against the median and roll up onto its side. The driver simply climbed out. In both of these accidents, I've not lingered long enough to see how they get the car back upright. Just pushing it back wouldn't necessarily work, since it might hit the median again or the traffic light support.

People drive small, light cars in Paris, cars that easily flip in this way if they hit something on a turn. Indeed, the most popular car in Paris appears to be the Mercedes Smart car, an incredibly tiny little car that is greatly favored by Parisians because it can park just about anywhere, and parking is the worst part of driving in Paris. These Smarts are so small that they can park perpendicularly to the curb in some cases and still fit. They also don't use much fuel (gasoline is $8 per gallon in Paris). Unfortunately, being Mercedes cars, their prices are not as small as their size would suggest, but I suppose there is economy in operating them. They are very cute.

Walking along the Champs a few days ago, I stopped in some of the flagship stores of major auto manufacturers. Several of them have exposition showrooms on the avenue, and some of these are coupled with restaurants, so that you can eat overpriced and mediocre food and admire the automobiles at the same time. At one time, you could even buy a new car in these places, too, but I think the actual dealerships have moved out.

The main manufacturers present on the avenue these days are Citroën, Renault, Toyota, and Peugeot. Citroën has the wildest exhibition space, recently completed after a very long period of construction. It features cars on rotating platforms, one above the other, several stories high. I haven't figured out how they get the cars onto the platforms, as there are no obvious ramps or elevators, and the platforms are so numerous and high that I don't see how they could all be lowered to the ground. It makes one a bit dizzy, in any case. There are rally and Formula 1 cars on display, plus a concept car, plus recent car models, plus an old 2CV, once the mainstay of automobile travel in France. The decor is a garish red and white. I didn't see any sign of a restaurant. The same location once held a more conventional showroom (relatively speaking) with a Hippo restaurant (Hippo is a chain of restaurants specializing in beef and waitresses in short skirts).

Renault has a showroom across the street, with a restaurant on platforms suspended above the cars on display. They have recent models, plus some F1 and other racing cars, all in mint condition, of course, along with a very early Renault model. At one time, they had a museum with a retrospective display of many early models, but that seems to be gone now, or I missed it. They place a lot of emphasis on Formula 1, and they have toys and key chains and scale models to sell. I've eaten here in the past; it was not a memorable experience apart from the high price.

Not to be outdone, Toyota has a showroom as well, with a restaurant on the upper floor that I haven't tried (Japanese cuisine, apparently). They have a lot of concept cars on the ground floor. The current concept car looks like an unbaked loaf of bread, with little jet engine exhausts, early Batman style, in the back (not visible in my photo). The decor is relentlessly white. There's an almost-obligatory F1 car on the upper floor.

Finally, Peugeot has a showroom up the street, which I didn't visit on this occasion. It might still have a dealership inside, but I think all the dealerships have been moved out now. I almost bought a Peugeot 206 there, years ago, after I got my French license, but I settled on a cheaper and nicer Renault Clio instead. (I don't have any car at all these days.)

You'd think that with the world's finest mass-transit system, Parisians wouldn't need cars—and indeed, about 80% of Parisians don't even have a license, much less a car. However, someone is still buying and driving cars in the city, including an ever-increasing number of totally useless and wasteful SUVs. The current mayor's vigorous attempts to discourage driving (adding more bicycle and bus lanes and reducing lanes for private cars dramatically) don't seem to have much effect.

I must admit that I'm not really interested in cars most of the time. I never went through that car-adoring phase that seems to afflict many boys sometime after puberty. Cars are just transportation, most of the time, although I suppose some of them are more fun to drive than others. My attitude is more typical of the average female consumer than the average male consumer … that is, I care mostly about fuel economy, reliability, and total cost of ownership. I don't even care about the color, usually; whatever is in stock is fine.

Shafted by France Télécom

I've been unable to put anything in this blog for several days because of the extreme slowness of my Internet connection. In theory, it's an eight-megabit ADSL connection, or at least that's how France Télécom (disguised as Orange) advertises it. Eight megabits corresponds to about 400 pages of typed text per second. However, that claim is largely fraudulent. For the past few days, the real-world speed of my connection has only been about 189 bits per second, which is roughly the speed of teletypes used during World War II, and it's 42,000 times slower than the advertised speed.

Customer service at France Télécom is incompetent. They appear to be minimum-wage non-specialists who work from simple scripts that tell them what to ask customers and what to answer (I used to do technical support, I know how it's usually done). If your problem isn't on the script, they don't know what to do, since they don't actually know anything about computers or networks. To them, everything is a problem with your modem (the little box that connects you to the Internet) or your computer. They like to send out technicians to look at your box, even when there's nothing wrong with it, because they can bill you $125 for the visit.

As far as I can tell (and remember, I've been working with computers since I was 12 years old), France Télécom deliberately undersizes the network, so that it doesn't have the capacity to deliver the speeds that they promise. With zillions of customers downloading for hours or days at a time (pirated software, pirated DVDs, and so on), the network is overloaded, and there isn't enough capacity to support everyone. There may be configuration errors, too, as I see strange things when I do traceroutes on my connection. Nobody in customer service understands this, and nobody in customer service seems to have any connection to the people at France Télécom who do understand it, and so there's no point in talking to customer service, as they cannot help, and they don't talk to the people who can.

It takes several hours to display a Web page right now (I'm not exaggerating). A lot of my e-mail is being lost because the data moves too slowly and the e-mail servers give up, or simply because a lot of the data is thrown away and the servers give up when they see no response. Most Web pages today require dozens of accesses to many different sites, and so they may never display at all. If my connection actually ran at the advertised speed, all of this would be virtually instantaneous. And I know that my line does run at that speed, because France Télécom has tested it, and my central office (the place where all the telephone equipment serving my line is located) is right across the street! So it's upstream on their network. But nobody in their customer service knows what "upstream" or "network" means. And this is supposed to be a "professional" subscription; I'm afraid to think what customer service is like for their "consumer" subscriptions. What a bunch of incompetents!

The problem would be easy to fix, but FT apparently doesn't want to spend money to fix it, or the people who could fix it don't know about it because it's impossible to get in touch with them (customer service is a dead end).

Unfortunately this is typical of technical support at many companies, and since I've worked in technical support, I know what the actual reasons are behind the scenes. I'm thinking of writing an essay on it. It boils down to greed and incompetence, though, in every case.

I'm looking right now at the results of the speed test I ran ten minutes ago. I'm getting 33 kbps, out of an advertised 8000 kbps. That's 240 times slower than the speed that France Télécom brags about, clearly slow enough to count as fradulent advertising. And yet it's 170 times faster than it was this afternoon (it's a little past 5 AM now). If I'm willing to wait 5-10 minutes, I can see a Web page. I hope this blog post makes it through.

Heat Wave No. 45,183

Hot weather has afflicted Paris again. Today was hot and humid, in contrast to the past few days which have been seasonal.

I had to drag myself outside to take clothing to the laundromat—Saturday night is my usual laundry night. I bought some milk and yogurt while the clothing was in the machine. When the clothing was done and dry, I came home. My creaky A/C keeps the temperature in the apartment slightly lower than that outside, thank goodness, and every little bit helps.

Despite the heat, people were out and about, this being Saturday night. The terraces of the restaurants are always full on Saturdays (and nearly so the rest of the week). The conditions inside restaurants on hot days are often stifling, which encourages people to eat outside. I live close to an area with lots of cinemas and restaurants and theaters, and it's usually busy in the evening no matter what the weather. I would have been tempted to go for more of a walk myself if the weather were cooler, but I get no enjoyment from an outdoor sauna, so I plan to spend my time flying (in simulation) and doing other things at home.

It's supposed to be cooler tomorrow.

Ordinary Eating in Paris

Prices are going up everywhere, but they were never low to begin with in Paris.

Case in point: The things I ate yesterday. I had a can of Coca-Cola, for $1.47. For lunch, I had a ham and cheese sandwich—several slices of Swiss cheese and several slices of ham in a tiny, mass-produced roll of bread—for $6.32. In the evening, I had a large cup of ice cream for $9.29, and a vanilla Frappucino for $7.94, both because it was hot outside.

So that's $25.02, just to eat a few snacks during the day (notice that I didn't eat a proper breakfast or dinner). Unfortunately, that is typical for Paris.

You might say that I could eat at home and save money. That's partially true. If I fast during the entire day, I can eat only at home, although that tends to give me a headache. Even then, however, the rock bottom I can eat for—skipping breakfast—is about $10.50. That's still about $320 a month for food, minimum.

Food prices have gone up a great deal in the past few years. After housing, food is the largest expense associated with living in Paris.

I used to be able to buy a plain hamburger at McDonald's for $1.40 (the cheapest item on the menu, with about 280 kcal), but they raised the price of that, too.

Actually eating in a restaurant, of course, is much more expensive, typically $60-$75 a day.

The Problem with Smoking

Early this year, France outlawed smoking in all public places. All the smoking rooms became illegal and had to be removed. Unfortunately, the French themselves are still heavily addicted to tobacco, and smokers who go through several packs a day are still legion.

The combination of a complete ban and a population that still includes many heavy smokers has produced a strange phenomenon. Pass any large place of business in Paris, at any time during the working day, and you'll see a crowd of people puffing away on their cigarettes in front of the main entrance. The bigger the building, the more smokers it will have in front, all day long. You have to walk through them to get in or out of the building. Seeing the number of them busy indulging their addictions and multiplying by the number of hours in the business day, one gets a feel for how much money and time these people are wasting for their employers as they take endless breaks for a fix.

If you really want to see this extended to almost a comical degree, go to La Défense, the huge high-rise business district just outside Paris, within sight of the Louvre and Arc de Triomphe. Buildings that accommodate thousands of people invariably have crowds of well-dressed office workers in front of them, all with cigarettes in their hands. If they were sitting on the sidewalk with needles in their arms, there's be a huge outcry about it—but since so many people in France are tobacco addicts, it apparently is allowed to slide. Still, it's money out the window, and I think it makes a poor impression to have a band of toxicomanes (drug addicts) milling about in front of the entrance to a chic skyscraper.

As it happens, the heaviest smokers tend to be young women. It's quite disappointing to see otherwise beautiful women, barely out of their teens (or sometimes still in their teens), walking down the avenues puffing on cigarettes. With the overall life expectancy in France, they're likely to spend the latter decades of their lives gasping for breath as the consequences of all those years of heavy smoking start to show. It's like the United States … with the clock turned back by 50 years.

Warwalkers Afoot

Lately I've noticed people with backpacks and laptops sitting in very unusual places outdoors while using their computers, such as doorways and window sills. It didn't take long for it to dawn on me what these people are doing: they're warwalkers—people who walk around with their computers looking for unprotected Wi-Fi hotspots so that they can use someone else's Internet connection for free (and somewhat anonymously).

These warwalkers look like American college students and are quite brazen, since they sit in windows and doors right on the street. I saw one sitting in the doorway of a closed restaurant (I've seen him there many times, it must be his favorite spot), and another one sitting in the window sill of a private residence. I assume the proprietors were on vacation, or they were incredibly unobservant (I'd notice someone sitting in my window).

One wonders exactly what these people are doing on the Internet that requires them to anonymously steal Internet bandwidth instead of just going to one of the thousands of places in the city that offer legitimate Wi-Fi access.

I also wonder if they shoplift and steal electricity as well. Most of them look innocent if you don't realize what they are doing.

This is why I don't use a wireless network at home.

iPhone Fever

The United States isn't the only country in which people camp out in front of stores to buy new gadgets. I've seen it in Paris, too, alas!

When the latest version of Apple's iPhone came out a few weeks ago, the big Orange store on the Champ (Orange is the operator that provides services for the iPhone in France) had a line of campers in front of it. I don't understand that kind of fascination.

Whatever its origin, though, this fascination is good for the operator and good for the manufacturer. Whoever said that Apple and Orange don't go together?

Behind Apple there is Steve Jobs, a charismatic and mercurial technology visionary, and behind Orange there is … France Télécom, a gigantic, slothful bureaucracy that for endless decades held the telephone monopoly in France. The latter provides good-quality but overpriced telecommunications services, and it has some of the worst customer service imaginable. Truly, apples and oranges! The Orange logo (in orange and black), always reminds me of Halloween (hmm). With FT/Orange you usually get reliable service, but if something breaks, getting it fixed is like a ride through a novel by Kafka.

Apple works hard to make sure that nothing is ever out of stock, but they've failed with the new iPhone, as it is out of stock in most Orange stores (possibly even the flagship store on the Champs, although I haven't checked there).

The iPod Touch, a gadget that is just like the iPhone 3G but without the phone function, is available. I've seen it in stores at only a few times the manufacturer's suggested retail price. I guess stores are willing to gouge if they can find willing gougees (and Apple groupies are among the most willing around).

I'm glad I'm not into gadgets like this.

Sixty-Four Years Ago Today

Monday marked 64 years since the liberation of Paris during the Second World War, on August 25, 1944—more specifically, it marked the surrender of Paris by the Germans to the Allies (there had been fighting for days before this).

Today, just about everyone who might actually remember that event is dead, and those who are alive are 80 years old or beyond for the most part. It's pretty much in the history books now, but there are still traces of what went on around the city today. Most of those traces are in the form of plaques that mention some person (usually a young man) who was killed on a certain spot during the Liberation. These are not to be confused with other plaques that mark places where people were shot by the Germans (particularly the Gestapo). A lot of these plaques of both kinds are in the Latin Quarter, where there was considerable fighting, but they can be found in all sorts of places.

Despite the considerable time that has elapsed since the Liberation, you still see flowers placed near these plaques, at least once a year on the anniversary of the event, and often at other times. Sometimes it's the city government that provides flowers, other times it is private organizations or even individuals. Some of those nice old ladies that you see filling eight-page prescriptions at the pharmacies were teenagers at the time of the Liberation, and spent their time indoors and frightened as bullets flew about outside their windows during those fateful few days.

I'm not the type to get misty-eyed over dusty historical battles, but it is interesting to see actual direct evidence of them in the present. The United States was fortunate in that it wasn't really attacked directly in any significant way in WWII (except for Pearl Harbor, and that was a military target), but here the capital city itself was involved in the conflict, and it probably would have been bombed to the ground if France had not surrendered to the Germans. Contrary to popular belief, the French were not cowards, but they were still reeling from an incredibly bloody First World War fought largely on their soil, and the prospects of help from their allies were slim at the time, so there wasn't much choice but to recognize their disadvantaged position and give up. Surrender saved a lot of lives, but subsequent deportations cost a lot of lives as well (and some French people were extremely cooperative with the Germans in facilitating that, far beyond what the Germans demanded—these cases of eager collaboration with the Germans are still a sore subject with the French).

Anyway, there are still a few ceremonies and other events to commemorate the Liberation, even though just about all the participants were born long after the war ended. I don't bother to look them up as I'm not into military stuff.

Nespresso 1 / Amex 0

Up near the Opera, I was very surprised to see that the venerable old office of American Express on the rue Scribe is being converted into … a Nespresso store. Apparently Amex is keeping a small office next door, but the big corner entrance now leads into a Nespresso outlet that is under construction. It's amazing because that Amex office has been there for ages, and it is (was) something of an icon. Nestlé hasn't torn down the Amex sign over the door (yet?), but the rest is being completely rebuilt.

Nestlé seems to be pulling out all the stops to sell its Nespresso machines and cartridges. It's very obviously a variation on the razor-blade model: sell the razor for almost nothing and then make your huge profits on the blades. In this case, sell the machines at a reasonable (but not cheap) price, then make your billions on the proprietary coffee cartridges that people must buy for the machines. It's as transparent as the giant picture windows at the front of the store, but people still go for it.

This store that vanquished Amex is big, but not as big as the gigantic Nespresso store on the Champs, with George Clooney half-smiling from every window. That store is comparable to the extremely chichi and huge Louis Vuitton store down the avenue. The money Nestlé must be spending to push their Nespressio line … the mind boggles. It's just coffee!

Then again, if Starbucks can put a coffee shop every 300 feet in Paris today (and yes, they have one on the Champs, and several others nearby), coffee must be big business, at least this week. There were no Starbucks here a few years ago; now they seem as common as McDonalds. At least Starbucks offers a very tasty vanilla Frappucino that is not polluted by the taste of coffee, although it's extremely expensive (as it must be in order to maintain 95% margins). When I can save up for it, I like to buy one occasionally, especially in summer because the Frappucinos are very cold (as they should be, since they are 99% crushed ice).

It's getting warmer again; high temps predicted for days to come. I hope the weather reports are wrong—they often are.