"The Pill You Love Can Turn on You": Feminism, Tranquilizers, and the Valium Panic of the
1970s
Author(s): David Herzberg
Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 79-103
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068349
Accessed: 02-11-2015 15:53 UTC
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The Pill You Love
I 79
"The Pill You Love Can Turn on You":
Feminism, Tranquilizers, and the Valium
Panic of the 1970s
David Herzberg
The smartlydressedwomandrivinga sleek,late modelcarcould be the envyof her neighbors.Shehasa lovinghusband,brightchildren,a beautifulhome in the suburbs,andapparently no caresin the world. Exceptone. This woman is a junkie.She is not the kind of
streetpeople,pushjunkieone thinksof in termsof long-haired"hippies,"counter-culture
ers, and illicit drugs.She is dependenton legal drugs, the kind prescribedfor her by a
physician.1
this 1978 article soon made clear, the "smartlydressed junkie" was
not alone in her addiction to Valium, "the new white-collar aspirin."
Former first lady Betty Ford became the most famous victim of "prescribed addiction"when she admitted her dependence on Valium and alcohol
in 1978, but even before this, hair-raisingstories like "Valium:The Pill You
Love Can Turn on You" abounded in popular magazines, local newspapers,
and on television shows such as 60 Minutes.2BarbaraGordon, television producer and author of a best-selling memoir and popular movie about her addiction to Valium (Im Dancing As Fast As I Can), told Peoplemagazine of a
spreading fear: "I'vebeen getting calls from women who are panicked. 'I take
two, I take four, I take six ... Do you think I'm addicted?'"3No fewer than
three congressional investigations of Valium and similar drugs grabbed headlines; at one of these, a physician warned that "if we were to stop abruptly the
availability of this drug, our country would be in an epidemic of anxious,
neurotic, psychotic, trembling citizens in acute withdrawal."4
Such scenarios might seem overblown were Valium not the single most
prescribed brand of medicine in the United States in the 1970s, with nearly
90 million bottles dispensed yearly.5According to respected national surveys,
15 percent of all Americans reported having used Valium or one of its cousin
drugs in the past year, 5 percent of them "regularly"(daily for months or more
at a time). The numbers were even higher for women, 20 percent of whom
reported use in the past year, 10 percent regularly twice the rate of men's
for
women's
use, and more than could be accounted
by
greater usage of the
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I American Quarterly
medical system generally.6These widely circulated statistics made the addiction of millions seem a distinct possibility.
Most eminent figures in psychopharmacology dismissed this prospect as
sensational nonsense.7The epidemiologists whose numbers fueled the panic
arguedthat Valium and other mood medicines were actuallyunderprescribed
in part owing to the irresponsible media.8 By the 1980s, when the intensity
had waned, scholarsquestioned why popular hysteriahad unfairly maligned a
safe and valuable medicine ("Whereare all the tranquilizerjunkies?"asked the
Journal of theAmericanMedicalAssociation).9The consequences, they pointed
out, were quite real: national surveys showed that Americans' perceptions of
the one-time "wonder drug" did darken, and use declined correspondingly.10
By the 1980s new medicines such as the antidepressantProzac and the antianxietydrugXanax- a pharmacologicalcousin of Valium- took Valiums place
as America'sleading psychotropes. (Japan,which saw no Valium panic, experienced no such shift to antidepressants.11)
This was hardly Americas first drug panic, or the first to be decried as
exaggeratedand unnecessary.Sensationalistpanicswere a long-standingAmerican tradition, stretching from the temperance movement to the twentieth
century's"wars"against narcotics.And yet Valium'sdefenderswere right to see
something new in it. Past scares had largely targeted drugs associated with
marginal populations, such as immigrants, nonwhites, or the urban poor. Indeed, antidrug rhetoric had long been an important tool for white middleclass cultural warriorslooking to dramatizethe threat posed by such "dangerous classes"to "our"society.12The Valium panic, on the other hand, involved
a quintessentially middle-class drug prescribedlegally by reputablephysicians
for their respectablepatients, and was popularly recognized as an entrenched
part of life in the comfortable classes, especially for women. Bogeymen from
the "dangerousclasses"had no role in this drama- and the usual antidrug
coalition of government, middle-class cultural crusaders,and medical authorities was openly involved in the Valium trade.
The possibility of Valium addiction attracted a new coalition of activists,
especially certain segments of the diverse second-wave feminist movement,
who redeployed the powerful cultural tools of the antidrug genre for their
own agendas.They revisedclassicdrug-scarenarrativesto sensationalizeValium
addiction among affluent white women as a central symbol of sexism and its
consequences, and they held up liberation from "mother'slittle helper" as an
archetypalstory of emancipation through feminism. These stories "stuck"to
Valium and remain fixed in popular memory about the drug even now, decades later.
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The PillYouLove I 81
This was, in many respects, a remarkablecampaign. It earned new audiences for feminist political messagesin mass-marketmedia such as GoodHousekeeping,Redbook,Vogue,and other places not usually considered feminist bulwarks. Its politically chargedsympathy toward addicts challenged the punitive
logic of the twentieth century's "waragainst drugs."And it changed popular
attitudes about Valium, helping reduce use of the drug to such an extent that
we may never know whether the "epidemic"truly existed or not- the panic
itself, in other words, may help explain the mysterious absence of "Valium
junkies"in the 1980s.
However emancipatory and effective feminists' "use"of Valium was, their
efforts did not ultimately break free of the race and class politics of the antidrug tradition. Valium crusaderscame from the ranksof feminists most interested in galvanizingwhite, middle-class women - the cultural quarterswhere
the tranquilizerwas most familiar. Part of their success came from their willingness to trade on assumptions of these women's essential innocence in a way
that excluded- and even reified- the "dangerousclasses"as a different sort of
drug user.This was hardly a surprising approach given the campaign'sgoals.
Anti-Valium crusadersdid not set out to engender a broad-based reorientation of the "waragainst drugs."And yet, their success in reworking the antidrug tradition for their own ends challenges us to imagine exactly that: a "war
against drugs"rebuilt as a civil rights campaign, challenging ratherthan reinforcing cultural stereotypes.
This imaginative task has broad relevance for the study of twentieth-centuryAmericanculture.Recent scholarshiphas persuasivelyarguedfor the central
importance of drugs and drug control in shaping modern global and American history. Drug-trade profits underwrote the British Empire and, later,U.S.
global dominance as well especially during cold-war military interventions
in Vietnam and Afghanistan.13Meanwhile, campaigns against drug trafficking have proved useful as well, providingculturaljustificationfor Anglo-American hegemony by blaming nonwhites for the drug menace. Antidrug stories
have also been important domestically, mobilizing state resources to control
suspect populations (immigrants, nonwhites, urban underclasses, etc.) and
dramatizingcultural distinctions between social groups in the United States.14
In focusing on illicit drugs, this scholarship has largely ignored legal medicines such as Valium or Prozac, even though they, too, alter consciousness,
may produce addiction, and have been the subject of much cultural and legal
contestation. Considerationof such "psychotropicmedicines"has instead fallen
to a different body of literature.The work of Jonathan Metzl, David Healy,
and contemporary observerssuch as Peter Kramerand Carl Elliott has begun
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I American Quarterly
to place the psychotropes culturally.They have argued that the pervasivepills
opened up new opportunities for renegotiating identity, sometimes- as Metzl
argues- to reinforceexisting stereotypes, sometimes- as Kramercontendsto resistthem.15This work, however, has focused almost exclusivelyon professional medical cultures (physicians and patients), thus mirroring other drug
scholarship in tacitly hewing to, if not necessarilyaccepting, the constructed
division between licit and illicit drugs.
Analyzing a "boundary case"such as Valium bridges this gap by exposing
the historical and cultural connections between medicine-cabinet and "street"
drug cultures. It sheds light on the process by which these two categories
emerged as different, and also shows how opportunities for resistanceopened
up in the resulting architecture of distinction. In particular,the Valium episode shows how the cultural tools of antidrug warriorscould become available
to different groups pursuing their own agendas, some of which posed challenges to the accepted logic of the twentieth century's "drugwars." But such
opportunities for resistancewere limited in subtle and powerful ways. Because
drug discourseswere so raciallycharged, this instance of cultural thievery also
illuminates how and why embracing a "white" and "middle-class"identity
could be such a strong- but subtle- temptation for those activists able to lay
claim to it.
The Street and the Medicine Cabinet
Before we can understand the Valium affair,we need to know more about the
complex and changing history of Americas drug wars, and how Valium came
to be at the center of one of them. As we will see, when antidrug crusaders
stirred popular fascination with the "dope menace" in the first half of the
twentieth century,their effortsestablishedraciallychargedlines dividing "medicines" from "dope." Prescription medicines became open to public scrutiny
only in the 1960s and early 1970s, when a number of different groups challenged those neat divisions and opened a rarewindow of opportunity for rethinking drug-warpolitics. These two chapters in American drug history provide crucial context for understanding the cultural tools feminists used to
frame the Valium affair.
Medicines and Dope in the "Classic" Era of Drug Control
During the nineteenth century, the "dope menace" took a backseat to "Demon Rum." Temperance was the main antidrug campaign, battling the evils
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The PillYouLove I 83
of alcohol and- especiallylater in the century- the working-classethnics presumed to be under its sway. Morphine, meanwhile, was a godsend painkiller
dispensed legally by physicians to respectablepatients, or sold directly to consumers through patent medicines. True, some observerswere alreadydenouncing opium-smoking "Orientals"in the west and, after the Civil War, drugcrazedAfricanAmericanmen in the south. But no organizedantidrugcampaign
emerged to match temperance, and, for the most part, medical therapeutics
remained the primary frame for understanding opiates and other drugs. Addiction was considered a wretched or even contemptible state, but was understood to be a privateaffairof the middle and upper classes- hardly a cause for
widespread alarm.16
Divisions between "medicine"and "dope"began to emerge around the turn
of the century, as the dangers of addiction became better known and the demographics of drug use shifted. The American Medical Association (AMA)
campaigned vigorously to reduce physicians' prescriptions of opiates, and
"muckraking"journalistsexposed the worst practicesof patent medicine companies. By the early twentieth century, these two main sources of drugs had
begun to dry up, and the number of addictsfrom the respectableclassesdropped
dramatically.This left other, previously less noticeable groups to become the
public face of American drug use: immigrants, urban workers, petty criminals, and others in the raciallymixed milieus of Americas burgeoning "urban
vice districts."17
By the 1920s, when drugs (now including the recently discovered heroin
and cocaine) had become fully associated with the "dangerousclasses," the
ongoing campaign to restrict them changed character.No longer was this an
internal AMA effort to reduce prescriptions, or a muckraking crusade against
corrupt patent medicine companies. Instead, antidrug campaigns began to
take on the chargedclass and racepolitics of the temperance movement, blaming nonwhite, poor, and other suspect populations for the horrors of addiction. Police, not medical authorities, assumed responsibility for drug control.
Over the next decades- the "classic"era of drug control- the federalNarcotics Bureauled an enormously influential public relations campaign that, with
help from sensation-hungry journalists, circulated scare stories blaming desperate and violent dope fiends for robberies, muggings, and urban moral degeneracy.The stories often highlighted racial stereotypes, with cocaine-using
African Americans driven to rape white women, Mexicans crazed and violent
with the "loco weed" marijuana, and inscrutable "Orientals" luring white
women into sexual slavery in opium dens. 18
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I American Quarterly
Ignored during this "classic"era was the continued existence of a different
kind of drug user:a legal drug culture of white, middle-classAmericanswhose
physicians supplied them with potentially addictive barbituratesedatives and
amphetamine stimulants- legal medical replacementsof sorts for opiates and
cocaine.19The number of "medicaladdicts"was probably small, and they were
of little interest to the network of experts, propagandists,and police agencies
campaigning against narcotics. Narcotics Bureau chief Harry J. Anslinger,
schooled in the failures of alcohol prohibition, personally resisted targeting
drugs used by "ordinary"Americans who might elicit sympathy in the pressor
the courts.20This selective willingness to defer to medical authorities helped
foster an enduring split between medicines and dope. By the height of the
narcotics scares in the 1950s, "addictive"drugs had come to mean- both legally and culturally- those used by "addictive"populations.21
The Return of the Medical Addict
After a half century of rising vehemence, the simple moralities of the "classic"
era of drug control began to unravel, slowly and inconclusively, in the early
1960s. The notion of addiction as a disease ratherthan a criminal act enjoyed
new public support from the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, and even received formal sanction from the Supreme
Court in 1962. 22Along with these challenges to drug-warverities came a blurring of the once-clear lines that divided medicines from dope. By the 1970s a
number of different groups, each following its own agenda, had called these
lines into question, reviving the figure of the medical addict and opening the
door for public scrutiny of prescription drugs.
Addiction researchers began this shift by decisively establishing the
addictiveness of licit painkillers and sedatives by midcentury, paving the way
for federalregulationof barbituratesand amphetamines in 1965.23A few years
later, epidemiologists reported to much media fanfare that use of sedatives
and stimulants was shockingly widespread: half of all adults had tried one,
and almost 20 percent currently used one "frequently."24
Meanwhile, the forof
merly unimpeachable reputations pharmaceutical companies and physicians came under new criticism. Congressionalhearingsand investigativejournalists exposed bare-knuckled drug marketing that seemed to encourage
overprescribing,while the "patients'rights"movement taught that physicians
and patients did not always share the same agenda.25Reported one former
drug salesman to the National Council of Churches, which held its own public investigation of the drug industry: "The biggest dope dealer in your com-
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The PillYouLove I 85
munity today may well be the good old family doctor, and the pusher supplying him is the tranquilizermanufacturer."26
Helping to draw public attention to these developments, and connect them
into a coherent critique of prescription drugs, were two unlikely allies:
"counterculture"youth and addiction treatment specialists. Some highly visible members of the counterculture, eager to justify their own drug use, delighted in drawing parallels with their parents' mood-modifying habits. In
San Francisco'sfamous Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, for example, a drugscene hangout called "The Drogstore"was decorated as a conventional pharmacy, mocking mainstream culture while also laying an absurdistclaim upon
it.27The Rolling Stones drovehome a similarpoint with their hit song "Mother's
Little Helper"in 1966. As one prominent new-generation drug scholar noted,
"everytime these supposedly law-abiding, drug-hating adults socialize with
each other, every time they relate to other human beings, and every time they
work or play at being happy or having fun they use drugs."28
The newly emerging medical specialty of addiction treatment had its own
reasons to acknowledge and even trumpet middle-class addiction to prescription medicines. Beyond the ethical drive to addresswhat addiction specialists
saw as a serious public health threat, they were still a fledgling professional
group that could only benefit from new patient populations from the paying
classes. Buoyed by immense federal funding, increased professional respectability, and rising cultural visibility during the 1970s' "rehabchic," these physicians were well situated to persuade mass-media journalists that they, not
psychopharmacologists,were the true "experts"about mood medicines.29
These various public criticisms of prescription medicines gained a wide
legitimacy in the 1970s. Respected epidemiologists looked for and found
links between parents' use of psychotropes and children'suse of alcohol and
other drugs, pointing to the continuity of behavior between taking medicines
and "doing"drugs.30In 1972, the Consumer's Union (publisher of Consumer
Reports)issued one of its respectedproduct-ratingreferencesdedicated to drugs.
While not adopting the political passion of counterculture critics, this book
did share the premise that all drugs, legal and illegal, could and should be
measured by the same criteria, even if the results challenged traditional assumptions. The title said it all: Licit and Illicit Drugs: The ConsumersUnion
Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants,Inhalants, Hallucinogens, and
Marijuana Including Caffeine,Nicotine, and Alcohol^ Given the polemical
history of drugs in America, the appearance (and popularity) of this evenhanded, calmly written mainstreambook offered striking evidence of the cul-
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I American Quarterly
tural change under way. For the first time in nearlyhalf a century, addiction to
prescription drugs had become a cultural, as well as physical, possibility.
"She Could Even Be You"
The circulation of new attitudes toward prescription drugs stirred a flurry of
mainstream media attention to medical addiction in the late 1960s and early
1970s, focused not on Valium but on barbituratesand amphetamines, and
bearing many of the hallmarksof a classic drug panic. A 1967 article in Look
magazine, for example, informed readersthat drug abuse had escaped from its
traditional home in the ghetto and invaded the medicine cabinets of middle
America. An old and shrinking population of "urban,poor, colored" narcotics
addicts had recently given way to "millions"of "white and affluent" Americans who "can'tsleep, wake up or feel comfortable without drugs." Using
prescriptions as an escape hatch, "seriousdrug problems" had escaped from
the "slums"and were now "sweep[ing] through white America:Junction City,
Kans.; Pagedale, Mo.; Woodford, Va.; Plymouth, Mich.- places with applepie smells and wind-snapped flags."32
The late 1960s was a propitious moment for this racially inflected drug
"invasion." Headlines were already attuned to the more fundamental challenges of racial integration, and addiction easily took its place as the latest
wave of "inner-city"encroachmentson "normal"America, jumbled along with
school bussing, African Americans moving to the suburbs, and even the interracial marriagein such movies as GuessWho'sComing to Dinner. These racial
issues were interlaced with other middle-class anxieties- about changing social values as well as an economic and cultural status threatened by the end of
postwar boom years.
Tales of addiction among "respectables"had always played upon just such
racial, economic, and cultural fears, and this prescription drug panic was no
exception. BusinessWeek,for example, warned in 1970 that "if you think the
'drugculture' is pretty much restrictedto the campus or the ghetto, you might
find some surprisesby taking a look around your office- and maybe even at
yourself."Why? Because "someof the same drugs peddled illegally in the street
can find their way into your bloodstream, too- albeit under more respectable
labels and usually through a doctor's prescription."33The New YorkTimes
opened a five-part1968 seriesby announcing:"AGrowingNumber of America's
Elite Are Quietly 'Turning On.'"34A respected drug epidemiologist, noting
that women were the primary users of barbituratesand amphetamines, summarized the picture for Ladies Homejournal readersin 1971: "Times Square
prostitutes"and other fringe elements were not the nation'sonly or even most
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The PillYouLove I 87
numerous female drug takers;instead, "the typical woman who uses drugs to
cope with life is an average, middle-class American- one of the folks next
door. She could even be you."35
The shadowy "street"and "ghetto"addicts hovering at the boundaries of
these reportshighlighted the cultural dissonance of imagining drug abuse as a
central facet of respectable, middle-class life. The "invaded"were essentially
different from the "invaders,"and the sensationalism of the stories came from
their linkage through the suspect pleasuresof drugs.
The stories were not entirely about alien threats,however.They also revised
the antidrug genre by casting a skeptical eye on middle-class culture itself.
Redbook,for example, debunked the notion that "accidentalmiddle class addicts" differed radically from illicit drug fiends: "In reality, the line between
them is hard to draw . . . most addicts are not, as myth would have it, perfectly
normal people at the mercy of irresistibledrugs."36Looksummarizedit bluntly:
"The trouble lies not in the pills, but in the people."37Many articles emphasized that pill poppers, not their physicians, were the problem, "talk[ing]doctors into writing prescriptions,"forging prescriptions,or even stealing to maintain their habit.38
Perhaps the most intriguing counterpoint to the invasion narrativewas a
genuinely new cultural space opened up by these stories: what one writer for
Atlantic Monthly described as the "white-collardrug scene." "Sometimes pilltakers meet other pill-takers, and an odd thing happens," he explained. "Instead of using the drugs to cope with the world, they begin to use their time to
take drugs. Taking drugs becomes somethingto do." He then described a "pill
party"at which the sophisticated but doped-out guests obsessively swallowed
and discussed their drugs while passing around the "Book"- the Physicians
- and reading its comically staid medical descriptions of each
Desk Reference
drug'suses.39The New YorkTimessimilarly described affluent pill swallowers
as part of their own "drugscene" as much as "the unemployed Puerto Rican
mainlining heroin in a rat-infested Harlem tenement and the barefoot hippie
taking LSD in a Haight-Ashbury pad."40This notion of a white and affluent
prescription-drug culture also made its way into the eras popular literature,
for example, in Joan Didion's stylish novel Play It As It Lays (1970) and
Jacqueline Susann's Valleyof the Dolls (1966, made into a movie in 1967). In
these classic period pieces, barbiturateswere a ubiquitous and unquestioned
option for wealthy, fashionable, but miserablewomen protagonists.41
However unhappy or unpleasant, these drug "scenes"were far removed
from the hothouses of deviance, violence, and perverseinterracialsex featured
prominently in drug stories from the classic era of narcotics control. If their
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I American Quarterly
denizens were not exactly pillars of middle-class morality, neither did they
appearto be grosslyabnormal. Indeed, what made them objects of fascination
was their seeming typicality,suggestingnot individualaberrationbut a classwide
failure of values. Journalisticdescriptions of them opened a long-ignored cultural space in the saga of addiction, one that dramatized troubles entirely internal to the nation's comfortable classes rather than posed from without by
fiendish "pushers."42It still emphasized a seemingly natural split between
medical and "street"addicts, but did so in a way that brought out parallelsparticularlyin assigning blame- as well as contrasts between the two. Against
the backdrop of American drug wars, "she could even be you" was a fairly
radical slogan.
By the mid-1970s, then, new challenges had arisen to traditional antidrug
politics, including the central premise that drugs and drug users were fundamentally different from medicines and medicine users. Some of these challenges were more radical than others, and most continued to traffic in classic
drug-warracialstereotypes, but taken together they representeda noteworthy
reconceptualizationof American drug politics. As we will see, when it emerged
a few years later, the Valium panic would build on both aspects of this inconclusive shift: its campaigners would take the new logic to a more politically
radical level, while at the same time reaffirming more traditional antidrug
tropes.
The Valium Panic
Throughout the prescription-drugaddiction scare of the early 1970s, Valium
and other minor tranquilizers received virtually no mention. Roche
Pharmaceuticalsvigorous lobbying stavedoff "scheduling"for its flagshipdrug
Valium until 1975, and ubiquitous advertisinghelped maintain the medicines
reputation in both medical and popular circles as safe, effective, and useful.
Warnings in the FDA-approved texts of advertisements and the Physicians
Desk Reference(PDR), for example, continued to emphasize only the risks of
prescribing for "dependence-prone"individuals, and conventional medical
authoritiesstill viewed the drugs addictivedangersskeptically.The most widely
cited medical referenceon Valium was a 1973 review in JAMA that praised it
precisely because "tolerance,abuse, and abstinence are very rare."43No new
federal restrictions curtailed its use, and while prescription surveys showed
declining use of barbiturates,amphetamines, and prescription painkillers in
the early 1970s, Valium seemed unaffected by the trend. Indeed, more than
half of Valium prescriptionswere for refills that did not require new authori-
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The Pill You Love
I 89
zation from a physician- a considerablyhigher proportion than for any other
drug in the United States.44
Two political events in 1975 opened Valium up for public scrutiny. First,
after a ten-year legal battle, Roche finally reachedan agreementwith the Drug
Enforcement Administration that enrolled Valium on the Schedule of Controlled Substances.45That same year, the recently created Drug Abuse Warning Network, a federal statistics-gatheringorganization, identified Valium as
the single most common drug discoveredin overdosevictims seen in the nation's
emergency rooms.46
Paying careful attention to these developments were members of a new
medical subspecialty focusing on addiction in women. Led by pioneers like
MarieNyswander,they brought to addiction treatmentthe logic of the women's
health movement, a pillar of the patients' rights movement focused on exposing the medical system'srole in defining and maintaining unhealthy notions
of "normal"womanhood. They were thus perfectly positioned to seize upon
an epidemic of addiction to "women's drugs," such as Valium. Nyswander
herself was much in demand in 1975, telling Voguemagazine, for example,
that Valium dependency was "afarworse addiction than heroin, morphine, or
meperidine (Demerol)," and a greater threat than those other drugs because
of its widespread use, particularlyamong women. In the article, titled "Danger Ahead! Valium: The Pill You Love Can Turn on You," she explained that
"today,probablyit would be very hard to find any group of middle classwomen
in which some aren'tregularlyon Valium."47
By the late 1970s, scores of alarmistarticlesin dozens of popular magazines
spreadword of the Valium menace. Television'smost respectednews program,
60 Minutes, ran a feature on it, and Ann Landerseducated readersabout it in
her nationally syndicated advice column. Three congressional investigations
explored the issue, most visibly Senator Edward Kennedy's 1979 hearings devoted entirely to "use and misuse" of Valium and Librium. Along with journalists'reportscame book-length exposes, one- StoppingValium- from Ralph
Nader's Health ResearchGroup.48
Most important in shaping this media sensation were feminists seeking to
highlight middle-class women's problems. Their rankswere drawn from many
different parts of second-wave feminism, including women's addiction specialists, the women's health movement, and ordinarywomen who met to discuss Valium in neighborhood "consciousnessraising"groups.
These feminists were well prepared to seize on the possibility of Valium
addiction, in large part because they had been criticizing tranquilizers and
sedatives for years as both symbol and substance of the constraints placed on
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90 I AmericanQuarterly
women of the comfortable classes. Betty Friedanwas one of the first to pursue
this strategy.Indeed, Friedans famous "problemthat has no name" resembled
nothing more than the symptoms of psychological distressfor which tranquilizers were widely marketed and used: "mild, undiagnosable symptoms" of
"malaise,nervousness, and fatigue," "atired feeling," and so forth. According
to Friedan, well-educated and materially comfortable women had been misled into believing that these problems were medical ratherthan political, and,
as a result, "many suburban housewives were taking tranquilizerslike cough
drops."And, indeed, one ubiquitous element of postwar medical discoursedrug advertisements- often highlighted housewives' misery only to suggest
"curing"it with pills, not feminism [see images]. But the suffering was not
medical, Friedanwarned, and while a housewife's "anxietycan be soothed by
therapy, or tranquilized by pills or evaded temporarily by busywork . . . her
human existence is in danger"because "she is barred from realizing her true
nature."Affluent and well educated, Friedan'sprotagonistshad sacrificedtheir
own potential accomplishments on the altar of housewifedom, and vague,
ambiguous anxieties- and tranquilizers- were one of many consequences.49
Tranquilizersworked as a political symbol to focus attention on the problems of the white and well educated because Valium and its predecessorshad
long been understood to "belong"to women of society'supper ranks. Indeed,
the mental and emotional problems they treated belonged to a tradition of
nervous illnesses that since the days of "neurasthenia"had been understood as
illnesses of affluent women.50As one might expect, narrativesabout Valium
use and Valium addiction tended to come from feminists who, like Friedan,
were most interested in the white middle classes.
The women's health movement of the early 1970s gave the notion of
psychotropes as an agent of social control, deeper articulation, and broader
expression. Doctors, activists claimed, had always seen women as naturally
sickly, or as frivolous complainers who took up precious time because they
were bored, lonely, and enjoyed the ability to command physicians'attention.
Their "complaints"were psychogenic- "all in their minds"- and thus they
were perfect candidates for therapywith tranquilizers.51It is worth noting that
these particulargender stereotypes, like tranquilizeruse itself, had alwaysbeen
associated with white, affluent women.
Feminists countered this kind of logic by arguing that women's complaints
were evidence neither of sickliness nor psychogenic self-amusement, but of
genuine political grievances. Housewives did not turn to drugs out of emotional weakness or pathology, but because pharmaceutical companies had
"medicalized"these grievances to sell drugs, working hand-in-hand with a
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I 91
sexist society resistant to women's liberation. Why should women "emotionally readjust"to a demeaning and
depressing situation? Not medical
therapy to individuals, but political "therapy"for society at large, was the answer.As one witness at congressional hearings in 1971 suggested, "tiredmothers might do better in working in the National Organization for Women than
in taking antidepressants."52
Feminists were able to get great publicity for this kind of argument in the
late 1970s by linking it to sensationalized stories of Valium addiction. Their
efforts took advantageof the cultural fascination with drugs long encouraged
by antidrug warriors to reach new audiences. Mass-market women's magazines were not known as feminist pioneers, for example, but it was in their
pages- in GoodHousekeeping,Redbook,Vogue,Harpers Bazaar, and othersthat the Valium addiction drama largely unfolded.
The kinds of narrativesgenerated by women's-mediajournalistscan be usefully examined through the stories of America'stwo best-known Valium users:
former first lady Betty Ford and Emmy-winning television producer Barbara
Gordon. While these women could hardly be considered typical, their experiences with Valium became archetypes thanks to media coverage of their stoFigure 1.
1968 ad for the tranquilizer,Miltown,Journalof
the American Medical Association 203 (5):
January29, 1968, p. 54-55.
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I American Quarterly
Figure 2.
1970 ad for the antidepressant Vivactil, Journal of the American Medical Association 212(2): April 13,
1970, p. 254-55.
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I 93
94
I American Quarterly
ries and the best-selling
memoirs both women published in the late 1970s.
Business, Advertising of Proprietary Medicines, Part 2: Mood
Betty Ford had been a
Drugs (Sedatives, Tranquilizers, and Stimulants (Washington,
dutiful, energetic, and (by
D.C.: GPO, 1971), AppendixII.
her own admission) hardin
wife
for
when
the
mid-1960s, her physicians
years
drinking politicians
nerve.
for
a
neck
For
the next decade she was
prescribedpainkillers
pinched
neverwithout pills. After her husband'sbrief stint as president, Ford remained
in the public eye, but friends (and reporters) noticed a change in the oncevivacious woman. She appearedvisibly drunk or sedated in her public appearances, most disastrouslyin a 1977 visit to Russia, where she was to narratethe
Nutcrackerballet. She would later recall that visit as a pill-induced "fog";one
U.S. journalist noted her "sloe-eyedand sleepy-tongued" performance.53
In 1978, Ford called a press conference to announce shocking news: she
had been "overmedicating"herself and planned to check into a naval hospital's
rehabilitationprogram in Long Beach. "It'san insidious thing," she said, "and
I mean to rid myself of its damaging effects."54Her son, Steve, told reporters
that his mother was fighting "avery rough battle against the effects of Valium
Figure 3.
1969 ad for Valium,Journalof the AmericanCollege Health
Association 17(5): June 1969, reprinted in U.S. Senate,
Subcommitteeon Monopolyof the SelectCommitteeon Small
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The PillYouLove I 95
and alcohol."55After eleven days in the program, Ford emerged once more to
announce that she was "addicted"not only to pills, but to alcohol as well. The
media hailed her decision as another courageous and forthright move by the
woman who had bravelygone public with her battle against breastcancer.She
was praised for having confronted the stigma of substance abuse head-on,
empowering other women to admit such problems in their own lives.56
BarbaraGordon, an award-winningtelevision documentary filmmaker,was
a different kind of public figure. Unmarried and childless, she loved the professional freedom she had to pursue her political and artistic passions. Despite
this, she described herself in her best-selling memoir (later a movie) as suffering from terrible anxiety, compulsively using Valium to face even mundane
activities such as shopping or eating in a restaurant.Visiting her psychiatrist
to receive the drug was, she later remembered, "routine, like brushing my
teeth, a normal part of my life, as it was for most of the people I knew."57
Jarredby a friends death and frightened by her growing relianceon Valium,
Gordon decided impulsively to throw her Valium away for good. Her psychiatrist, she later recalled, was angry about her decision and suggested that she
switch to a more powerful drug- the antipsychotic Stelazine. When she refused, Gordon wrote, he curtly told her to quit taking Valium all at once rather
than slowly reduce her dosage. Gordon did so, and soon experienced psychotic episodesthat landedher in a mental hospitaltwice overthe next year.After
grueling but enlightening "talk"therapyin the institution, she finally emerged
pill and anxiety free, eager to warn other women about the risks of Valium.
Ford'sand Gordon's stories as told in the media and by the women themselves highlight the three most important narrativedynamics of the Valiumaddiction genre. First, neither woman was portrayedas at fault for her condition. They may have been ignorant of the risks, but they weren't seeking a
"high"and harbored no hidden characterflaws that might explain their drug
use. Valium addicts in the news had always recently quit using the drug, or
had only just discovered that dependence might be a problem and had vowed
to quit. Indeed, the moment of becoming aware of drug use was, in most
stories, identical with the moment of deciding to quit- once the therapeutic
rationale for taking Valium had been stripped away, all desire to use it simply
disappeared.Thus Ford simultaneously announced her "overmedication"and
her plan to rid herself of its "damagingeffects." Gordon'ssuspicions about her
drug dependence grew more slowly, but once she accepted her inability to
function without Valium, she insisted on going off the drug, despite her
psychiatrist'sanger and despite the suffering her decision caused her.
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I American Quarterly
Second, women's addiction was attributed to sexist social structures like
housewifery and the medical system. Physicians in Valium stories prescribed
the drug to cover up genuine grievances,such as the depression and loneliness
of homemaking, the difficultyof adjustingto a husband'sconstant careermoves,
and so forth. Or they prescribedfor seemingly random reasons, such as vaginal infections, skin rashes,or "premenopausalanxiety."58BarbaraGordon, for
example, portrayed her uncaring and condescending psychiatrist as having
practically forced Valium on her, dismissing her fears of dependence with a
brusque assurancethat "it'snot addictive, and you don't have to worry about
it." As she told Peoplemagazine, women should be wary of trusting their physicians: "I was a docile patient," she said acidly, "and ended up in a mental
hospital."59
Betty Ford's memoirs offered no such criticism of physicians, but other
observers were glad to fill in the gap. One addiction specialist told People
magazine in an interview about Ford that some doctors earn "agreat deal of
money providing these quick panaceasfor their patients. [Others] simply don't
know that what they are doing is extremely dangerous, but at this juncture,
ignorance of the problem should no longer be an excuse." In a grim irony, she
noted, women'smore frequentvisits to physicians"puts[them] in much greater
jeopardy"than men.60
Gordon'scall for women to stop being "docilepatients"and become politically aware advocates for their own interests highlights the third central element of the Valium addiction genre: feminism as a solution to addiction. The
transformation from passive patient to assertiveparticipant echoed the tactic
of "consciousnessraising"as adapted by the women's health movement, whose
members sought to educate themselves so that they could negotiate more effectively with medical authority, or even circumvent it altogether.
Combining this approachwith the idea that doctors, not patients, were the
ones who wanted women to be taking Valium, many media reports included
sections on warning signs of addiction, strategiesfor recognizing what drug a
physicianwas prescribing,how to question the decision if necessary,and where
to look for addiction treatment if the physician resisted.McCalls, for example,
ran this large-type inset above one of its articles: "Thousands of Americans
routinely take these [tranquilizers]to relieve backache or tension- or simply
get through the day. When they want to stop, many find they can't. Here is
how to recognize the dangers of getting hooked- and where to find help."61
These strategieswere not only rhetorical.As formerValium addict Cynthia
Maginnis told Congress in one of its three late- 1970s investigations, women
were banding together at the neighborhood level to create new drug rehabili-
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The PillYouLove I 97
tation programs based on feminist principles. Maginnis herself had helped
create one such program, Women-Together, out of her local consciousnessraising group. The women in the group had discovered that they no longer
needed to take Valium, Maginnis said, and so they applied for funding as a
drug treatment program.The resulting organization aimed not simply to cure
addiction, but to heal entire individualsthrough feminist consciousnessraising.
What they called "outmoded destructive behaviors"would slowly wither away
in the "caring,but nonrescuing atmosphere by strong, centered feminists."62
As Women-Together suggests, feminists of the 1970s like Maginnis had
helped frame a strikingly different kind of drug panic. Most antidrug campaigns demonized addicts, pointing to defective characteras the cause of drug
use and sensationalizing the addicts' threat to "normal"society. The Valium
scare embodied the sympathetic, humane, and politically sophisticated approach long favored by progressive drug reformers but rarely seen in actual
practice. Rather than using addiction to air negative stereotypesof drug users,
feminists used addiction to dramatizethe hardshipsfaced by essentially innocent Valium-using women in a sexist society. Instead of punishment for addicts, they called for greater political awarenessand assertiveness.Their success in reiningin Valium use through such tacticsmakesthis panic an important
but almost entirely overlooked alternative to the punitive antidrug policies
studied by scholars and implemented by policymakers.
After severalyearsof public criticism, Valium'sdays as a wonder drug- and
as Americas most-prescribed medicine- came to a decisive end. Use of the
drug declined steeply at the end of the 1970s to under 60 million prescriptions per year; this was less than half the mid-1970s' peak volume, despite
population growth.63National opinion surveyssuggested that this decline was
accompanied by increasingly conservative attitudes about Valium use. While
manufacturersof other tranquilizersquickly stepped in to fill the medical and
commercial niche (advertisersfor Abbott Laboratory'sTranxene,for example,
touted it as a nonaddictive Valium replacement64),Valium'sdownfall reflected
feminists' broader success in redefining tranquilizer use itself. The next successful "wonder drug for the mind"- the antidepressant Prozac- would be
presented by its champions as nearly the opposite of Valium: it was a stimulant, not a relaxant,and its most famous proponent, psychiatristPeterKramer,
explicitly deemed it a "feminist drug" for its ability to make women more
forceful, less empathetic, and more likely to succeed in the business world.65
Of course, all this may look less impressiveif no Valium threat ever actually
existed. But to say that Valium'scritics overhyped the danger is not to say that
Valium presented no danger at all. Even most skeptics agree that Valium can
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98 I AmericanQuarterly
cause dependence if used regularlyfor a long enough period of time.66Regular
long-term users may have been a tiny minority of Valium takers,as the drug's
defenders pointed out; but given the large numbers involved, even small proportions would have meant a significant problem. A respectednational survey
in 1979, for example, found that one-fifth of Valium users had been using the
drug daily for more than a year.That one-fifth portion representeda full 1.6
percent of all American adults- well over a million potential addicts. Even if
only a small fraction of these had a problem, it would still be a serious concern
and the reduced use that followed the Valium scare a welcome relief.67
Feminists' groundbreaking strategies in the Valium panic, however, owed
at least some of their success to the way they were designed for white, middleclasswomen addicts.The vast majorityof popular media stories followed Betty
Ford and BarbaraGordon's example in being quite explicit about this, describingcorporatewives and professionalwomen sufferinghorriblewithdrawal
in "decorator-furnishedliving rooms"and "ordinarysuburbs."The quote from
the FDA Consumerthat began this article was a classic example, deploying
"junkies"and "streetpeople" for shock value but also to underscorethe whiteness and affluence of the Valium addicts.
This dynamic is capturedperfectly by Cynthia Maginnis s testimony before
Congress. The story she told followed a classic arc: unhappy housewife to
Valium addict to consciousness-raisedfounder of the Women-Together drug
rehabilitation program. Maginnis described the program as designed to serve
women who were "not the same as people using illicit drugs, who are often
court referralcases." It was, she continued, an important alternative to programs "designed to deal with people very different from me." While she did
not elaborate on these differences, her reference to "court referral"and her
own resolutely middle-class story spoke eloquently on their own. A later witness at the hearing voiced similar concerns, complaining about the "humiliating" red tape of traditional rehabilitation programs and pleading for alternatives to regimens "targetedto the hard core heroin addict, persons who would
be more likely to commit violent crime to get funds to maintain the habit."68
Like other anti-Valium crusaders,Maginnis found that her whiteness and
affluence helped gain the sympathies of men and women who sharedher background. Faced with long-standing cultural traditions of assigning individual
moral blame to drug users- and treating women addicts as willful gender
deviants- Maginnis turned for support to another culturally availablenarrative, one that cast white, middle-class women as innocent and pure. Her plea
to understand "peoplelike her"echoed the travailsof professionalwomen and
white-collar housewives suffering from "the problem that has no name."
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The PillYouLove I 99
One of the central claims of the Valium affair was, in essence, that these
white-collar problems, and thus Valium addiction, were fundamentally different from those of the "streetjunkies"used as sensationalist decorations in the
stories. To accept feminism as a drug policy for Valium did not imply accepting political awakening and activism across the board as a solution to the
nation'sdrug problems. Like other historical instances of what George Lipsitz
calls a "possessiveinvestment in whiteness," the terms of this cultural transaction were clear.69Anti-Valium campaignerssucceeded because they were able
to present themselves as an exception; their concerns could be addressed,even
in feminist terms, because they raised no challenge to the broader policing
agenda of the "waragainst drugs." That this approach was so effective is an
instructive lesson in the challenges facing those who would build cross-class
and cross-racealliances.
By the 1980s, when the Valiumaffair(andValium use) had waned, the political atmosphere surrounding drugs in America had also changed. Few influential voices still blamed social injustice ratherthan addicts for the nations drug
problems, as resurgentantidrugwarriorsralliedaround simple enunciations of
personalresponsibilityand a renewed focus on inner-city nonwhite drug users.
In the revived war against drugs, "She Could Even Be You"became (as First
Lady Nancy Reagan advised) "JustSay No." If there truly had been a window
of opportunity for organizing a broad-basedchallenge to drug-war politics in
the 1970s - a big if - it certainly seemed to have closed a decade later.
Ultimately, the Valium scaredeservesattention on two grounds. As an episode in drug history, it offers an alternativetemplate for cultural responses to
a perceived drug problem- one that encourages less punitive, and possibly
more effective, medical and regulatorycampaigns. For good reason, scholars
have tended to focus on how the state has used antidrug campaigns to police
minorities and other stigmatized groups. The Valium affair shows how other
groups, such as feminists, could shift the political rhetoric of drug panics to
their own agendas, improbably transforming the drug war into a kind of civil
rights campaign.
As an episode in the history of second-wavefeminism, it offersa case study in
the strengths and limitations of the Friedan wing's brand of activism. Their
resolutely middle-class focus helped these activists reach culturally privileged
women- a powerfulpolitical constituency- but did so at the cost of obscuring
other kinds of women's issues, in effect making a bid to define feminism itself
as concerned with the white-collar classes. One can only wonder what the
Valium panic, or any other drug scare,would have looked like if powered by a
more inclusiveeffortto define and combat the social underpinningsof addiction.
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I American Quarterly
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
1 1.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Thanks to Nan Enstad, Judith Leavitt, Paul Boyer, Erin Hatton, Gwen Walker, Matt Levin, Kori
Graves, Honor Sachs, Thea Browder, Eric Hatton, the anonymous reviewers for American Quarterly
for their help in thinking through this essay in its various incarnations, and the Buffalo and Erie
County Public Library staff for help with images.
"Tranquilizers:Use, Abuse, and Dependency," FDA Consumer,October 1978, 21.
"Danger Ahead! Valium: The Pill You Love Can Turn on You," Vogue,February 1975, 152-53.
BarbaraGordon, I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). The film version
appeared in 1982. Quotes from People,June 18, 1979, 98.
Conway Hunter in U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee
on Labor and Human Resources, Examination on the Use and Misuse of Valium, Librium, and Other
Minor Tranquilizers(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1979), 52. See also U.S. Senate, Select Committee on
Narcotics Abuse and Control, Abuse of Dangerous Licit and Illicit Drugs: Psychotropics,Phencyclidine
(PCP), and Talwin (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1978); U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select
Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Women'sDependencyon PrescriptionDrugs (Washington,
D.C.rGPO, 1979).
U.S. Department of Commerce, Drug Utilization in the U.S.- 1985; SeventhAnnual Review (Springfield, Va.: National Technical Information Service, 1986).
Hugh Parry,Mitchell Baiter, Glen Mellinger, Ira Cisin, and Dean Manheimer, "National Patterns of
Psychotherapeutic Drug Use," AMA Archivesof GeneralPsychiatry28.6 (June 1973): 769-83.
See, e.g., Leo Hollister at al., "Valium: A Discussion of Current Issues," Psychosomatics,JanuaryFebruary-March 1977, 47, and Frank Ayd, "Benzodiazepines: Dependence and Withdrawal" [edito242.13 (September 28, 1979): 1401-402. For a popular overview, see Gilbert Cant,
rial],/^/^
"Valiumania," New YorkTimesMagazine, February 1, 1976, 34, 44.
See, e.g., Dean Manheimer et al., "PopularAttitudes and Beliefs about Tranquilizers,"AmericanJournal of Psychiatry,November 1973, 1253.
Elizabeth Rasche Gonzales, "Where Are All theTranquilizer Junkies?"/y4AM269.19 (May 20, 1983):
603-4; Jonathan Gabe and Michael Bury, "Tranquilisers and Health Care in Crisis," Social Science
and Medicine 32 .4 (1991): 449-54; see also Jonathan Gabe, ed., Understanding TranquilizerUse: The
Role of the Social Sciences(New York: Routledge, 1991); Mickey Smith, A Social History of the Minor
Tranquilizers:The Questfor Small Comfort in the Age of Anxiety (1985; New York: Pharmaceutical
Products Press, 1991); Susan Speaker, "From 'Happiness Pills' to 'National Nightmare': Changing
Cultural Assessment of Minor Tranquilizers in America, 1955-1980," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences52.3 (July 1997): 38-76. Historians David Healy and Edward Shorter, writing
more broadly about psychiatry and psychopharmacology, do not dismiss the Valium affair in this way.
Janice Clinthorne, Ira Cisin, Mitchell Baiter, Glen Mellinger, and Eberhard Uhlenhuth, "Changes in
Popular Attitudes and Beliefs About Tranquilizers, 1970-1979," AMA Archivesof General Psychiatry
43.6 (June 1986): 527-32.
Laurence J. Kirmayer, "The Sound of One Hand Clapping: Listening to Prozac in Japan," in Prozacas
a Wayof Life, ed. Carl Elliot and Tod Chambers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2004), 164-93.
A rare exception was the Progressive Era campaign against opiated patent medicines, which, like
Valium, were associated with respectable users. David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, 3rd ed. (New York:Oxford University Press, 1999); Nancy D. Campbell, Using Women:
Gender,Drug Policy,and SocialJustice (New York:Routledge, 2000); Caroline Jean Acker, Creatingthe
AmericanJunkie: Addiction Researchin the ClassicEra of Narcotic Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002); Curtis Marez, Drug Wars:The Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
David Courtwright, Forcesof Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World(Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2001); Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: The Complicity of the CIA in
the Global Drug Trade(New York: Lawrence Hill and Company, 2003); Marez, Drug Wars.
Marez, Drug Wars;Musto, TheAmerican Disease-,Campbell, Using Women;Acker, Creatingthe American Junkie.
Jonathan Metzl, Prozac on the Couch: PrescribingGender in the Era of WonderDrugs (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2003); David Healy, TheAntidepressantEra (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), and The Creation of Psychopharmacology(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
This content downloaded from 134.184.26.108 on Mon, 02 Nov 2015 15:53:26 UTC
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The Pill You Love
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22 .
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
I 101
Press, 2002); Peter Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Penguin Books, 1993); Carl Elliott, Better
Than Well:American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); Elliott
and Chambers, Prozac As a Way of Life-,Judith Gardiner, "Can Ms. Prozac Talk Back? Feminism,
Drugs, and Social Policy" Feminist Studies 21 .3 (Fall 1995): 501-17.
David Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2001); Acker, Creatingthe AmericanJunkie, 18-42, and "From All Purpose
Anodyne to Marker of Deviance: Physicians' Attitudes Towards Opiates in the U.S. from 1890 to
1940," in Drugs and Narcotics in History, ed. Roy Porter and Mikalas Teich (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 1 14-32; Musto, The American Disease.
Courtwright, Dark Paradise;Acker, "From All Purpose Anodyne to Marker of Deviance.
Musto, The American Disease. As Campbells Using Women points out, however, in some instances,
such as "opium vampires" in the 1920s, white women addicts were stereotyped as willful gender
deviants, not entrapped innocents.
Charles O. Jackson, "Before the Drug Culture: Barbiturate/Amphetamine Abuse in American Society," Clio Medica 11.1 (April 1976): 47-58; Acker, Creating the AmericanJunkie, 125-55.
Anslinger interview with Musto, cited in Musto, The American Disease, 213.
An early exception of sorts to this rule in the 1950s were amphetamines, known for illegal use by truck
drivers and college students. Even so, a clear distinction remained between safe medical use and addictive criminal use. See Susan Speaker, TooMany Pills: Patients,Physicians,and the Myth ofOvermedication
in America, 1955-1980 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1992), and Charles O. Jackson, "Before the Drug Culture: Barbiturate/Amphetamine Abuse in American Society," Clio Medica
11.1 (April 1976): 47-5 8; Acker, Creating the AmericanJunkie, 125-55.
Drug Addiction: Crime or Disease?Interim and Final Reportsof theJoint Committee of the American Bar
Associationand the American Medical Association on Narcotic Drugs (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1961); Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 1962.
U.S. Public Law 74, 89th Cong., 1st sess., July 15, 1965.
See, e.g., Hugh Parry,"Use of Psychotropic Drugs by U.S. Adults," Public Health Reports83. 10 (October 1968): 799-810, and Parry et al., "National Patterns."
Morton Mintz, The TherapeuticNightmare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965). See also, e.g., Harold
Schmeck, "Nader Group Sees Pressureon FDA: Asks Congressional Inquiry on Industry's Influence,"
New YorkTimes, April 3, 1972, 30; John Pekkanen, The American Connection: Profiteeringand Politicking in the "Ethical"Drug Industry(Chicago: Follett, 1973), 80-81; Milton Silverman and Philip R.
Lee, Pills, Profits, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 58-59. For congressional inquiries, see U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee on the
Judiciary,AdministeredPrices in the Drug Industry(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1959-1961); U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Monopoly of the Committee on Small Business, Competitive Problems in the
Drug Industry (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1969), and Advertising of ProprietaryMedicines (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1971); U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and
Public Welfare, Examination of the PharmaceuticalIndustry(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1974); Useand
Misuse of Benzodiazepines, 1979 (Subcommittee on Health, Examination on the Use and Misuse of
Valium). For an overview of the patients' rights movement, see Paul Starr, The Social Transformationof
American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Professionand the Making of a VastIndustry (New York:
Basic Books, 1982), 379-420.
Reginald Bowes, "The Industry as Pusher,"Journal of Drug Issues4.3 (Summer 1974): 238; the full
hearings were published in the Summer 1974 and Winter 1976 volumes of the journal.
Anthony Lukas, "The Drug Scene: Dependence Grows, New YorkTimes,January 8, 1968, 22.
Joel Fort, The PleasureSeekers:The Drug Crisis, Youth,and Society(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Mernll, 1969),
195-96. For overviews of "counterculture"drug use, see John Burnham, Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, TakingDrugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History (New York: New
York University Press, 1993), 112-45; Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete
Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
William White, Slaying the Dragon: The History oj Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America
(Bloomington, 111.:Chestnut Health Systems, 1998), 263-78.
See, e.g., Reginald Smart and Dianne rejer, Drug Abuse among Adolescents and 1 heir rarents:
Closing the Generation Gap in Mood Modification," Journal of Abnormal Psychology79.2 (April
1972): 153-60.
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102
I American Quarterly
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
5 1.
52.
Edward Brecher, Licit and Illicit Drugs (Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Consumers Union, 1972).
Roland Berg, "Drugs: The Mounting Menace of Abuse," Look, August 8, 1967, 1 1-28.
"Drug Culture: Take a Look at Your Office," BusinessWeek August 15, 1970, 83.
Martin Arnold, "The Drug Scene: A Growing Number of Americas Elite Are Quietly 'Turning On,'"
New YorkTimes,January 10, 1968, 26.
Carl Chambers and Dodi Schultz, "Women and Drugs," Ladies Home Journal, November 197 1, 19 1.
Sam Blum, "Pills That Make You Feel Better," Redbook,August 1968, 125.
Berg, "The Mounting Menace of Abuse," 1 1-28.
Chambers and Schultz, "Housewives and the Drug Habit, Ladies Home Journal, December 1971,
138.
Bruce Jackson, "White-Collar Pill Party,"in Observationsof Deviance, ed. Jack Douglas (New York:
Random House, 1970), 256-59.
Lukas, "The Drug Scene," 22.
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays:A Novel (New York: Farrar,Strauss, and Giroux, 1970); Jacqueline
Susann, Valleyof the Dolls (New York: Bantam Books, 1966).
Some nineteenth-century observers, such as eminent neurologist George Beard, saw a special predilection for addiction ("inebriety") among the nations elite as part of their overall susceptibility to "neurasthenia." See George Beard, American Nervousness(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1881).
Barry Blackwell, "Psychotropic Drugs in Use Today: The Role of Diazepam in Medical Practice,"
JAMA 225.13 (September 24, 1973): 1640.
Refill numbers were tracked by the trade journal American Druggist in its fortnightly prescription
surveys.
See Proclamation 7 174, Federal Register31(17 May 1966); Proclamation 17474, Federal Register32
(6 December 1967); Proclamation 7968, FederalRegister(21 May 1969); Proclamation 2557-8, Federal Register34 (6 February 1971); Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc. v. Kleindienst, 478 F.2d (1973); "U.S.
Ready to Propose Controls on Use of Librium and Valium," New YorkTimes,January 31, 1975, 57;
"The Growing Debate Over Safety of Drugs," U.S. News & WorldReport,June 16, 1975,61-62.
See "FederalAgency Lists Most Widely Abused Drugs," JAMA 236.5 (August 2, 1976): 432.
"Danger Ahead!" 152-53. See also Nyswander quoted in John Lombardi, "Valium: The Popcorn of
the 1970s," Out magazine, September 1976, 96, and Penelope McMillan, "Women and Tranquilizers," Ladies Home Journal, November 1976, 164-67.
Eve Bargmann et al., Stopping Valium (Washington, D.C.: Public Citizen's Health Research Group,
1982); Richard Hughes and Robert Brewin, The Tranquilizingof America: Pill-Popping and the American Wayof Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 20-21, 31, 293, 314. See Daniel
Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making 0/The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War,
and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
Francis Gosling, BeforeFreud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), esp. 10-1 1, 30-32, 83-84; BarbaraSicherman, "The Uses of a Diagnosis:
Doctors, Patients, and Neurasthenia," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences32. 1 (January 1977): 33-54.
See, e.g., Emily Martin, The Womanin the Body (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); I. K. Broverman et al.,
"Sex Role Stereotypes and Clinical Judgments of Mental Health," Journal oj Consulting and Clinical
Psychology^4. 1 (February 1970): 1-7; Jean Lennane and John Lennane, "Alleged Psychogenic Disorders in Women," New England Journal of Medicine 288.6 (February 8, 1973): 288-91; Ruth
Cooperstock, "Sex Differences in the Use of Mood-Modifying Drugs: An Explanatory Model," Journal of Health and Social Behavior 12.3 (September 1971): 238-44.
Robert Seidenberg quoted in Advertising of ProprietaryMedicines, 551. For a sampling of similar
arguments, see Pauline Bart, "Depression in Middle-Aged Women," in Womanin Sexist Society:Studies in Powerand Powerlessness,ed. Vivian Bornick and BarbaraMoran (New York:Basic Books, 1971),
163-86; and W R. Gove and J. F. Tudor, "Adult Sex Roles and Mental Illness," AmericanJournal of
Sociology 78.4 (January 1973): 812-35; Jane Prather and Linda Fidell, "Sex Differences in the Content and Style of Medical Advertisements," Social Science and Medicine 9.1 (January 1975): 23-26;
Deborah Larned, "The Selling of Valium," Ms., November 1975, 32-33; Gerry Stimson, "Women in
a Doctored World," New Society32 (May 1, 1975): 265-67; F. Suffet and R. Brotman, "Female Drug
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The Pill You Love
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61 .
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
I 103
Use: Some Observations," InternationalJournal ofAddictions 11.1 (January 1976): 3 1; Elissa Henderson
Mosher, "Portrayalof Women in Drug Advertising: A Medical Betrayal,"Journal of Drug Issues6. 1
(Winter 1976): 72-78; Tona Kiefer, "The 'Neurotic Woman' Syndrome," The Progressive,December
1980,23-29.
Betty Ford with Chris Chase, Betty:A Glad Awakening (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987), 39-50;
see also "Prisonerof Pills," Newsweek,April 24, 1978; "Bettys Ordeal," Time,April 24, 1978; "Trouble:
Betty Ford and Drugs," PeopleApril 24, 1978, 49; Byra MacPherson, "Betty Ford:The Untold Story,"
McCall's, July 1978, 18; "Mrs. Ford's Hospital Stay Linked to Medications," New YorkTimes, April
12, 1978, A13; "Mrs. Ford'sIllness Described," New YorkTimes,April 16, 1978, 24; Boyce Rensberger,
"Abuseof Prescription Drugs: A Serious but Hidden Problem for Women," New YorkTimes,April 19,
A12. An autobiography and two biographies published shortly thereafter dealt with her substance
abuse: Betty Ford with Chris Chase, The Times of My Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Bruce
Cassiday, BettyFord: Womanof Courage(New York:Dale Books, 1978); Sheila Weidenfeld, First Lady's
Lady: With the Fordsat the White House (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1979).
"Bettys Ordeal," 31.
Muriel Nellis, "In Her Own Words," People, May 8, 1978, 102.
McCall's, for example, reported that a Cleveland treatment program received more than one hundred
calls the day after Ford'spress conference - a tenfold increase from its usual pace (MacPherson, "Betty
Ford," 18).
Gordon, Dancing As Fast As I Can, 16.
See, e.g., Kennedy Hearings, 11; Hughes and Brewin, The Tranquilizing of America, 70; They re
Finding a Way Out of the Prescription Drug Trap," New YorkTimes, February 3, 1979, 12; Morris
Chafetz and Patrick Young, "The Complete Book of Women and Pills," Good Housekeeping,April
1979, 73-76; Myron Brenton, "Women, Doctors, and Alcohol," Redbook,May 1979, 27.
BarbaraGordon, "In Her Own Words: Addicted to Valium," People,June 18, 1979, 92, 97-98.
Nellis, "In Her Own Words," 106.
Susan Jacoby, "The Tranquilizer Habit," McCall's, January 1980, 42-46; see also, e.g., The Three
Most Dangerous Drugs," Good Housekeeping,March 1978, 233-34; Elizabeth Whelan and Margaret
Sheridan, "The Prescribed Addiction," Harpers Bazaar, January 1980, 100-101.
U.S. Congress, House of Representatives Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Womens
Dependency on PrescriptionDrugs, September 13, 1970, 96th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.:
GPO, 1970), 4-7.
The decline began, gradually, after Valium appeared on the list of controlled substances in 1975, but
became noticeably more intense at the end of the decade. See, e.g., U.S. Department of Commerce,
Drug Utilization in the U.S.
See, e.g., Medical WorldNews, 23 .11 (May 1982): 20-22: lranxene helps avoid ettects that encourage drug-seeking behavior" and "helps avoid drug-induced 'buzz' or 'high,'" and so is the perfect drug
"if you're concerned about tranquilizer effects that promote unwarranted requests for prescriptions."
Kramer, Listening to Prozac.
See, e.g., Hannes Petursson and Malcolm Lader, Dependence on Tranquilizers(New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984), 93, and John Marks, TheBenzodiazepines:Use, Overuse,Misuse,Abuse(Lancaster,
U.K.: MTP Press Limited, 1985), 34-35.
Glen Mellinger and Mitchell Baiter, "Prevalence and Patterns of Use of Psychotherapeutic Drugs:
Results from a 1979 National Survey of American Adults," in Epidemiological Impact of Psychotropic
Drugs, ed. C. Tognoni, C. Bellantuono, and M. Lader (New York: Elsevier/North-Holland Biomedical Press, 1981), 117-35. See also, e.g., David Greenblatt, Richard Shader, and Jan Koch-Weser,
"Psychotropic Drug Use in Boston Area,"Archivesof GeneralPsychiatry32.4 (April 1975): 5 19, which
found that 4.5 percent of all new patients surveyed had been regularly taking minor tranquilizers for
more than a year.
U.S. Congress, "Women's Dependency," 12.
George Lipsitz, The PossessiveInvestment in Whiteness:How White People Profitprom Identity Politics
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).
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