"America is the country where you can buy a lifetime supply of aspirin For one dollar and use it up in two weeks"

America’s paradox of abundance and anxiety is captured succinctly by Barrymore’s words. The country’s dazzling accessibility to consumer goods, including healthcare essentials, allows almost anyone to purchase vast quantities of items that are marketed as solutions for modern life’s discomforts, pain, stress, and malaise. The hyperbolic reference to a "lifetime supply of aspirin" for a single dollar spotlights the astonishing affordability and excess available in America’s consumer culture, where mass production and competitive pricing make even medical commodities seem trivial in monetary value.

Yet, beneath the humor lies a somber undertone: the suggestion that a quantity meant to last "a lifetime" is depleted in a mere two weeks speaks to a particularly American brand of stress and overexertion. It hints at a lifestyle so saturated with pressures, work deadlines, social expectations, economic instability, that a remedy intended for rare and occasional use becomes a regular, even daily necessity. The medicine cabinet’s contents are emptied not by physical illness alone, but by the relentless psychological and emotional demands faced by so many.

Barrymore’s line, with its dry wit, also invites a deeper critique of American consumerism. The ease of acquisition does not equate to contentment or health; instead, it might enable or mask deeper issues left unaddressed. The statement implies that Americans, presented with solutions to their suffering in easy-to-swallow pills, might treat symptoms rather than causes, dulled by the very conveniences that their society celebrates.

Moreover, it reflects on the promise and pitfalls of the American dream. Material sufficiency and freedom of choice abound, and yet fulfillment, peace, and well-being seem perpetually elusive, as evidenced by the rapid consumption of something as symbolically curative as aspirin. Barrymore cleverly exposes the contradiction: a surplus of remedies, a scarcity of relief.