The doctor in the tiny town in Northern New York where I spent my teenage years, was popularly regarded as a “pill pusher.” We all knew that when we left his office we would be holding a prescription. We just felt that these prescriptions were often unnecessary. (Of course, we filled them anyway.) The term “pill pusher” seems to have gone out of fashion when (a ) in the early 1970s recreational drugs took over the town’s teenagers, and (b) people began to go to doctors and demand prescriptions.