I thought I was safe. I wasn’t a child, so I wasn’t likely to suck on lead-paint toys. I wasn’t a pet, so I wouldn’t get melamine-tainted wheat gluten in my food. Then Sanjay Gupta knocked me out of my safety net.

On CNN last weekend, he happened to mention that a whopping 50 percent of the active ingredients in our American-made pharmaceuticals are imported from China. At first, I figured, sure, who knows what’s in those generics? No, the good doctor was not talking about generics, but expensive brand-name drugs and over-the-counter medications. They may be manufactured here, said Sanjay, but the active ingredients come from China.

Well, of course, that makes sense: Our giant pharmaceutical companies aren’t making enough profits, so they must buy cheap ingredients from China to boost their bottom line.

As for oversight on whether those “active” ingredients are the genuine article and/or are safe to ingest, FDA checks all drugs for safety and efficacy, right? We know they ignore our food, but they are vigilant about our drugs, right? Guess what FDA’s oversight amounts to on these Chinese-made active ingredients? The FDA must formally be invited by the Chinese government to inspect a supplier being used by an American company. Then the Chinese government gives that company a 30- to 60-day notice that the FDA will be coming around. Finally, the Chinese companies themselves generally provide the Chinese translators.

Being a fiction writer, my mind started churning up a few scenarios. How’s this one? Before I start spinning, here’s an important disclaimer: I am not one of those conspiracy theorists. I’m talking fictitious plot, strictly Hollywood, as in a James Bond movie.

Here’s the plot for my B movie. In a move to take over the planet, an up-and-coming empire whose specialty is manufacturing and exporting cheap junk decides to take down a once-great empire, formerly referred to as the Leader of the Free World. Taking over the world, if you are the maker of cheap junk, does not involve getting rid of your enemy. Rather, it can be as easy as turning the target country into a mindless, frenetically insatiable consumer population.

How do you do that – in this purely fictional movie? First, get to the children, every one of them, by coating all their toys in beautifully colored lead paint. You do not want to kill the children, just stunt their intellectual development enough to turn them into undiscriminating adolescents for their whole lives. A perpetually adolescent-like population will mindlessly consume cheap junk and then lust for more, always discarding one piece of junk for the latest, new wonderful piece of junk. You need just enough lead poisoning to create the kind of fuzzy minds that could be convinced to spend a thousand dollars on a ticket to scream in person over a corporately created rhyme such as “Hannah Montana.”

I’d like to meet the person who thought up that name. It’s got that same hypnotic pull as “Rock Chalk! Jayhawk!” Hannah Montana! Hannah Montana! Absolutely brilliant marketing. And parents fall for it because they want nothing better than to be loved by their children, and of course the best way to be loved by your children is to give them everything they ask for, right? Yeah, right, if you’ve been sucking on lead paint a bit too long.

Babies put everything in their mouths. It’s part of their natural development. Toddler toys coated in lead-laced paint. Perfect vehicle to zap a whole generation’s brains. So that’s step No. 1. (I thought about maybe having them lace a few toys with the same chemical found in the date rape pill but rejected that. Nah, couldn’t happen.)

Next, in this B movie: for those too old for the lead paint attack, mess with their meds. Make sure they don’t work, that they never quite feel well, leading them to embark on a lifetime of trying one cure after another on an endless search to find something to make them feel good. That seems to come naturally to boomers, who were the first generation to hang out way too long in adolescence. So zap the aging boomers. No matter if the diabetes test strips are a fraud. No matter if the active ingredient in their pills ain’t active at all. Foolish Americans! Thinking they can swallow health anyway. The ancient sages of this emerging Great Empire know what good medicine really is, and it isn’t found in a bottle. But the dumb Westerners don’t know that.

I don’t know where to fit the pet food debacle in this scenario. This is stretching : but maybe a few beloved pets dropping here and there demoralizes the old crumbling Empire’s population. After all, they’ve forgotten how to connect with other human beings. TV reality shows and pets are all they’ve got to get them through the night. Maybe when their pets die, they will need more doodads to distract them from their grief.

By the way, did anyone other than me wonder why a pet food company based in Kansas, the Wheat State, needed to buy wheat gluten from China? Just asking.

OK, done with the conspiracy daydreaming and the bad scriptwriting. I don’t for a moment think China has dreamed all this up as a scheme to fell our Empire. For them it’s just frenetic greed – dare I say it, for them it’s just capitalism. We, the consuming nation, are at fault. It’s our Empire, grown phlegmatic and addicted to stuff, stuff and more stuff. What makes us think that quantity is more important than quality. What makes us think it’s a good thing to put 35 things under the Christmas tree for our children instead of three or four. What makes us think that it’s a good thing to litter our children’s world with cheap toys that stunt their imagination, with or without a coating of lead paint.

What kind of world have we created for ourselves? Why does our economic system depend on how much stuff people buy over the Christmas shopping season? Is anybody other than me getting tired of Christmas decorations in the store the day after Halloween or the “Retailers Are Worried” headlines in the media that begin appearing in November?

Why must we be “consumers” instead of people?

A group of influential black radio talk show hosts asked their listeners to go one day – Nov. 2 – without buying anything. It didn’t get much publicity. I don’t know what the point of it was supposed to be. But I do know that a number of major retailers tried to talk them out of it. One day without buying would hurt our economy irreparably, they said.

One day without buying cheap stuff made in China might be the best medicine this country could swallow.