Pills

Drugs in general play an important role in the text, but pills serve as a particularly important symbol of both anarchic freedom and government control. Tripizoid is the drug taken in pill form that is key to enfolding. The government uses it to control its unruly veteran population, and it has close connections to the novel’s central characters as well. In one almost throw-away line, Klein mentions that Meg is a part of the Upjack family, therefor an heir to a large pharmaceutical fortune. They are best known for “‘the development of what they called the friable pill, a pill that wouldn’t dissolve until it reached the gut. That led to a patent…and finally, Tripizoid, which was originally a veterinary product for horse sedation’” (68). In an ironic twist, when Rake kidnaps Meg, he uses an incapacitating cocktail of pills to keep her under...