It probably started late last weekend. He wasn’t his usual self. He just wasn’t as active and his appetite was waning, that was for sure. Ordinarily, he could down his food in 20 second flat, but now he just sat there and looked at it.

I even tried giving him his favorite food, beef in gravy,

and he wouldn’t eat a bite. He even stopped drinking water.

After the third day of this, he was looking and acting very lethargic. He started to growl at me when I got near him, and that’s how I knew something was really wrong.

By now you’re probably thinking to yourself, gee, Dave must have been really sick! Well, close. I’m talking about our “number two” cat, Nifty (there are three in total). We had to take him into the vet’s office. He was extremely dehydrated and limp. They kept him overnight in the cat hospital because his temperature was 104.4, which is really hot,

even for a cat. Their “normal” temperature should be just over 100.

When we picked him up two days later, he had a prescription for clavamox, which is actually the veterinary version of the antibiotic amoxicillin. I joked that “humans could take it if they got sick,” but the vet remarked that there was a problem with that. He said, though, that many people are taking medications that are meant for their animals.

Well, I just had to find out more about this trend. I’ve seen the “60 Minutes” episodes where busloads of elderly people are taking day tours to Canada or Mexico because their prescription drugs are much cheaper over the boarder. But to consider taking a prescription meant for your pet, now, this could be dangerous, right?

I did some research when we got home, and found some really interesting information. And this is where it gets weird. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, no governmental body tracks crossover use of animal preparations. But 3,702 people were poisoned by veterinary drugs in 1998, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers in Washington, D.C.

I read many interesting stories. A woman who owned a pet store in California had been to her dentist for an infected tooth. She was prescribed penicillin for treatment. She ran out of it and decided she could take penicillin intended for fish. She figured it would be all right to take, since she was already being prescribed it. Sound fishy to you? It should. Because you really don’t know the correct dosage to take, and then again, some medications aren’t exactly as pure as they would be for human treatment.

There was the case of the bodybuilder who was taking massive amounts of Equipoise, a horse steroid intended to build muscles. Vets very rarely recommend this steroid for horses because it makes them high-strung (the same thing happens in people). Without a doctor monitoring the bodybuilder’s health, he was potentially risking liver damage and kidney problems! Speaking of horses!

Then there’s the story of race track employees who put an arthritis medication meant for horses on their breakfast cereal. Called Flex-Free (chondroitin), it’s gained widespread attention as a treatment for humans, but it is still in its experimental stages as to how it affects people.

Did you know that two of the biggest sellers in the pet and feed stores are DMSO and MSM? Some people promote them as remedies for arthritis. MSM has yet to be tested in humans, and DMSO is thought to contribute to vision problems. Neither one is approved for regular medical use in humans.

Here is a shocker. Though many people are using animal medicines due to their cheaper cost and easier availability, some people also want them for “highs” they produce. Two very popular and illegal drugs are valued for their hallucinogenic effects on the mind. PCP (angel dust) and Ketamine (special K) got their start as animal tranquilizers.

In particular, ketamine must be stored under lock and key, because it is a very desired hallucinogen. Criminals break in veterinary offices and try to steal it. K affects the central nervous system, cardiovascular and respiratory systems. It makes the user feel dissociated from their bodies. A big downer is the nausea, possible violent behavior, irregular heartbeat, and dependence on using it. I’ve heard it’s very, very popular in the club scenes.

Another hazard of veterinary drugs comes from their lack of proper packaging for human use. The problems come in two forms. Accidental overdose can occur when children are around, as veterinary drugs rarely come packed in child-proof containers, so they can be extremely dangerous to toddlers. And many drugs being sold for animal use are prepared in different concentrations and at different levels of purity than those commonly used in humans. It’s difficult to tell how much you (as a human) should take. You can try to figure it out by bodyweight, but that’s probably not accurate. If your cat weighs 10 lbs and you weigh 200, should you really take twenty times as much as your cat? You can easily overdose yourself, or you can expose yourself to impurities.

While in many cases, it’s probably true that veterinary drugs are just human drugs in different packages, you can’t be sure. It’s a shame in this country that people are forced to pay outrageous prescription medication prices while people in other countries pay much less for the exact same thing.

At least there’s one happy thing, Nifty is doing purrrrfectly now. But he still fights back when David has to squirt that eyedropper in his mouth twice a day!