And the new boyfriend still scares me

I have posted a couple of times before (here and here) that I have some worries about Boyfriend 5. Well, those pesky worries just won't go away.

I asked Wife today what news she had. She mentioned that Boyfriend 5 has been sick in bed for several days because he got "some bad drugs." Before I could ask what street-corner he had bought these on, she explained that he gets prescriptions by mail from some American mail-order pharmeceutical provider, and that every single one is prescribed for some legitimate health condition.

Then in what sense were they "bad drugs"? Oh, she said, they got the formula wrong on one batch, or something like that. Anyway, it made him really sick for several days.

There are several things about this story that make no sense at all. In the first place, Boyfriend 5 is (supposedly) not an American national; how can he possibly be getting his prescriptions from this company? Well, Wife insists stoutly that he is; and I suppose I can't prove that they do no business outside the USA. So that part niggles at me, but I can't pin it down as an absolute lie.

But the second part of the story is impossible. American pharmaceutical providers are controlled by the FDA, under regulations scary enough they would curl your hair. Therefore, any American pharmaceutical provider will have controls in place to guarantee that every batch of a given medicine is exactly the same as the previous batch. A company without these controls would be shut down, and their executives would risk jail time. And no CEO -- no matter how crooked -- is going to cut corners in an area that he knows will come under regular Federal scrutiny and that could send him to jail. As one coworker of mine put it (after several years of owning his own business): "The most important advice I could ever give any business owner is, 'Don't fuck with the Eagle.' "

In short, it is impossible that Boyfriend 5 could have been made that sick by some maintenance medicine that he regularly takes, all because of some processing irregularities on the part of an American pharmaceutical provider. At least one of the elements of this proposition has to be false. Either this is a new medicine and he is just now discovering unknown side effects (and the rest of the story is squeaky-clean), or he bought the drugs on a street-corner. Or maybe he was never sick at all but had some other reason for being away from his computer and unable to IM Wife for several days. In any event, somehow or other, he is lying to her.

Did I ever mention that he is an ex-drug addict?

It hardly needs to be said that Wife is absolutely convinced of this man's honesty, and is certain that anything he tells her must be true. I wish I knew any way at all to let her see what is so obvious to me. But she doesn't want to see it.