Accutane (thing)

Evil shit made by the pharmaceutical company Roche. Taken regularly, it alters your skin's chemical composition, in order to eliminate acne. Apparently it's done wonders for people with extremely bad cases, and for most people it causes skin problems to completely disappear after five months. Which might make it worth the side effects, which include:

• Terrible, terrible acne, much worse than you used to have, from around the end of the first month to until you're "healed"
• Unbelievably dry skin and chapped lips
• Bad lower back pain after the first month
• Unnaturally red skin
• Horrible, horrible birth defects -- females are required to be on two forms of birth control a month prior to, during, and a month after taking the product
• Recently verified by the FDA: Clinical depression

How much would you expect to pay for a month's supply (sixty 40-mg capsules) of this wonderful stuff? $100? $150? This shit costs about $350/month. And if you're not one of the 95% who only need to take one set (five months) before you're cured, you get to pay $3500 over the course of the worst year of your fucking life.

And if you're really fucking unlucky, you'll still have acne a year after you've finished your treatment, and look in the mirror one day to see one of those giant lesion-looking zits sitting there on your face. The only kind of epidermal flaw the stuff actually kept off of me, and now I have one again. I thought this kind of thing was supposed to be gone when I hit 18 and my body stopped growing.