(If you're wondering over The Engineer, my tentative theory is that it briefly appeared on the Hold shelves during my August trip and has by now been retracted back into the stacks, possibly without notice of same reaching my Library Account, although it is at least as likely that I just didn't register some notification or email. I shall try again.)
I thought about running this last week, but, on the other hand, it's officially a thing when there's two different articles about barbiturates in the same week. The age of Homo medicus! (Which turns out to be some dietician-anthropologist-paleontologist science thing, my apologies to Edward H. Hagen for not searching out some more authentically patronising Fifties label for patients using psychotherapeutics.
As of 28 May 1956, there isn't much of a sense of alarm over the rising non-prescription use of barbiturates. I guess the idea we have today is that untreated PTSD was raging through the post-WWII generation (it'll honestly do for a global explanation of the first two-thirds of the Twentieth Century). If I had to wildly speculate based on my vague sense of the cultural history, the moment when people had their uh-oh moment would be the starlet overdose deaths of the Sixties, starting with Marilyn Monroe, but that's 1962, and there's lots of drug culture before the "5" on the clock calendar rolls over to a "6." Naked Lunch, William S. Burrough's third novel, was published in 1959, by which time his act, which I am sure was very sincere and serious, and isn't just another embarrassment for my parents' generation, was eight years old. In case anyone was interested, Ken Kesey started writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1960, and it was published in 1962, at which point we can declare the whole "deinstitutionalization good, psychiatric medication bad" trend to be rolling. .
Diazepam, under its trade name, Valium, is the archetypical "Mother's Little Helper" of the Fifties, although as we can see from the Newsweek coverage, the misogynistic angle starts when peole start having second thoughts about these wonder drugs. Although the Newsweek article suggests that there is nothing new about antidepressants by reaching back to Hippocrates and hellebore, it turns out that Diazepam was patented in 1959 as part of a systematic search for more benzodiazepines after the accidental discovery of chlorodiazepoxide (Librium) in 1955. Librium was not placed on the market until after Valium due to difficulties of synthesis, however. I'm a little surprised to find that these mass-market antidepressants postdate Thorazine, the quintessental "psychiatric drug," which appeared on the United States market after rather more extensive research trials in France than the diazepams got on this hemisphere.
The core "tranquilizer" drugs of the Fifties were, of course, the barbiturates, a well-known range of drugs in including sodium thiopental, one of the "truth serums" of pulp fiction and popular culture, although not as effective or widely used as sodium amytal. Barbiturates can quickly form dependencies and tolerances, and there was a long, long list of barbiturate suicides by the time Newsweek's 21 May 1956 issue went to press. Wikipedia glibly explains that "It was not until the 1950s that the behavioral disturbances and physical dependence potential of barbiturates became recognized. It also notes that barbiturate "goofballs" were widely distributed to U .S. troops in the Pacific to "improve their tolerance of the heat and humidity of tropical working conditions."
Oh my God. For serious? I did not know this! Were the troops in question primarily ahem "Coloured?" Inquiring minds want to know who exactly the US Armed Forces zombified into pliant tropical work forces!
Since it does not seem as though the barbiturate addiction/self-harm problem was unknown to much of anyone, excepting the FDA, it is not surprising that the cartoonist's miracle pills, per the 21 May Medicine article, would be the meprobamates, including Miltown and Equanil; Reserpine, Azacyclonol, and Pecazine.
I thought going into my typically rigorous click-around-Wikipedia research effort that these would all be the Monoamine oxidase inhibitors that modern medical history likes to talk about. It turns out that this is because they this is because they were reasonably responsibly developed and used. You cannot say that about the list of popular brand names I found in Wikipedia! Pecazine was first synthesized in 1953, and is already on the market in 1956, only to be withdrawn after belated clinical trials conducted in 1960 showed it to be an ineffective antipsychotic with too many side effects for a mass market "tranquiliser." Reserpine had a similarly brief test period. It is known for a host of serious side effects, being passed on through breast milk, for having a serious addiction risk, and for a depression-causing paradoxical rebound that was important in the formulation of modern theories about the biochemical causes of depression. On the other hand, it is an extract of a traditional medicine, Indian snakeroot, so you can cut the FDA some slack. To all appearances it was as well-tested as any other member of the traditional pharmacopia. (It's also that favourite of drug and sport humorists, "horse tranquilizer.") Azaxylonol was introduced as an schizophrenia treatment, but, as we've seen, quickly crossed over to off-prescription use. It achieved some fame as a treatment for bad LSD trips, but clinical trials suggest that this is hogwash, and the drug has been discontinued.
Meprobamate, the active ingredient in Miltown, the most popular of the new "tranquilizers," is still in use today, since unlike some of the others cited above, it is reasonably safe and actually works. It is perhaps no surprise by this point to learn that it was developed in Britain, originally as a penicillin preservative, and that its tranquilising effects on laboratory rats was noted in a 1946 article. Frank Berger, the discoverer, was recruited away to Carter Products (and, yes, that's the Carter Products of Carter's Little Liver Pills, although by this time the company had taken its wheelbarrow of money out of the patent medicine business and spun the operation off). The product is named after the compoany headquarters of Miltown, N.J., and was launched in 1955. Wikipedia cites numbers similar to those published by Newsweek: 36 million prescriptions in the U.S. alone by 1957, one third of all prescriptions, and a billion pills made.
Okay, okay, but some of these statistics, or visionary statements about them, come from a special conference in New York City in October of 1956,, specifically from a keynote address by, wait for it, Aldous Huxley.
 |
| Jayne Mansfield was a very attractive woman who died of a barbiturate overdosed, and it is part of the traditional culture of us media-talking guys to exploit her looks, so really I'm just honouring that tradition. |
Anyway, Carter Products was hit with an antitrust action in 1960, at which point it was revealed that the company had made $40 million on it in five years, which in a further whiplash-inducing Fifties fact, was still deemed to be quite a lot of money. (Okay, it's still quite a lot of money for me, but you know what I mean.) It's also pretty addictive, it turns out, who could have guessed?
In conclusion, if the Fifties were kind of crazy, you sure can't blame the pharmacists. They were doing their best!
No comments:
Post a Comment