As long as humans have experienced emotional crisis (which is to say: for all of human history), they’ve attempted to ease their pain with drugs—plant-based psychoactives like marijuana in preindustrial societies, alcohol during the Industrial Revolution (quickly industrializing late nineteenth-century London, population 1 million, consumed an estimated 200 million quarts of beer, 50 million quarts of wine, and 10 million quarts of rum each year, for example). What’s new about our modern era isn’t drug consumption, it’s that drugs have become much more specifically formulated to ease each form of pain we experience in modern life. As capitalism has invented ever more ways to be miserable, so too has it invented ever more specific ways to ease that misery.
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In an essay examining the origins of trauma and PTSD, the writer Will Self argues that mental trauma and the anxiety and despair it causes are inherent to the invention of modern, industrialized society. Self writes that technologies like the railway and the factory, and the very organization of life by a clock, were so destabilizing to our preindustrial rhythms that they caused a body-and mind-altering anxiety. In this understanding of modern capitalism, the PTSD caused by war, or, say, a neo-Nazi plowing an American muscle car into a crowd of protesters, is not unique; it is just the furthest node on a spectrum of the trauma that essentially everyone experiences under modern capitalism.
Which perhaps explains why it was at the height of industrial America that an industry dedicated to calming people down blossomed.
The 1950s saw the introduction of the first popular, industrially made anti-anxiety drugs. First with an antipsychotic called Thorazine, and then, most popularly at the time, with meprobamate, aka Miltown, a sedative with mysterious chemical properties (to this day no one really understands how it works) that immediately flooded American culture and bloodstreams. Newspapers called it a “wonder pill” and “emotional aspirin.” Pharmacies made signs that said “Miltown Available Tomorrow” to temporarily ward off the growing hordes of people coming in to get it.
By the late 1970s, Americans were consuming 2.3 billion Valium tablets a year. Billion. With a B.
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“Fashionable ladies and hard-driving male executives alike kept their supplies close at hand,” historian of science Anne Harrington wrote in her book Mind Fixers. “Greeting card companies created cute Valentine’s Day designs that incorporated the drug, and bars introduced the Miltini—a martini with a Miltown tablet in place of the traditional olive.”
By the late fifties, one in three prescriptions in America was for meprobamate. Fifty tons were being produced a month, and a billion tablets had been sold within a few years.
And then, as fast as they took over America, the pills disappeared, not because people realized that consuming vast quantities of drugs was bad, or because the government regulated their use, but because a new class of drugs, promising even fewer side effects and less potential for addiction, took over. And those pills, developed fifty years ago as a replacement for Miltown, are what sit in my bathroom cabinet, and in a small pill case in my bag wherever I go in case I have a panic attack.
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