Inheritance

If you're looking for a contemporary vision of medication abuse, go to read the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. 

Central to the idea of "relaxation" is a young New York woman's numbing herself to near-coma with a remarkably huge repository of dangerous drugs. Risperidal, Ambien, Valium, Ativan, chewable melatonin, trazodone, Nembutal, Benadryl, NyQuil, Xanax, Lunesta, and her list goes on and on.

The tragedy of this miserable woman goes all the way back to her baby days when her mother, a bedroom drunk, crushed Valium into her milk bottle to "console" her for colic and crying. 

You might wonder how a zombie poisoned by that many psychotropic medications could have survived. Well, she could barely arouse the enthusiasm to stand up straight. She took a shower once a week at most. She didn't do much in her waking hours besides watching movies. That woman didn't have to work as she had all her bills on automatic payment plans. She didn't have to worry about property taxes on her apartment, because rent money from the tenants in her dead parents' old house upstate showed up in her checking account by direct deposit every month. 

In short, she survived by inheriting the fortune from her parents. Or, should we say, she inherited the misfortune from her mother who mixed alcohol with sedatives?