Mother’s Little Helper

PETER: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And we’re talking today about Americans’ changing attitudes about drugs and drug users.

BRIAN: We’re going to turn now to 1979, when high profile Senate hearings on drug abuse captured national headlines. But this time, the threat wasn’t heroin or cocaine or marijuana, it was Valium.

FEMALE SPEAKER: This is Valium, a so-called mood altering drug, which, according to a government study, is the most popular and one of the most abused prescription drugs in America today. Most of the abusers are women.

BRIAN: This NBC report, from 1978, outlined what had come to be seen as a national crisis, affluent, suburban wives turning into drug addicts. The report featured a young mother, Cindy McGinnis, who described her addiction as she ate dinner with her husband and children.

CINDY MCGINNIS: I was not coping with my family. I was sleeping a lot during the day. I was up at night. My body was completely out of whack by the time I tried to stop taking them.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Was there no warning? Why did you wait so long before you got hooked?

CINDY MCGINNIS: I thought I was taking medicine.

BRIAN: In the mid-1970s, Valium was the most commonly prescribed drug in America, with over 100 million prescriptions a year. Women used it at twice the rate of men. And this was nothing new, anti-anxiety drugs had been disproportionately prescribed to women for well over a decade. Advertisements in medical journals told doctors, in no uncertain terms, who these drugs were intended for.

DAVID HERZBERG: It might show a woman. It looks like she’s behind the bars of a jail cell. But, in fact, they’re the handles of brooms and mops. And it says, you can’t set her free, but at least you can help her feel better.

BRIAN: This is David Herzberg, an historian at the University of Buffalo. He says that drug companies also targeted women more directly. They got favorable articles placed in mainstream magazines, like Newsweek, Time, and Vogue.

DAVID HERZBERG: Now how it would work is that the pharmaceutical industry, as part of its very large public relations arms, during the ’50s, had a stable of science writers, who were technically freelancers, but who generally tended to write about pharmaceutical issues. And they were in the pay of the pharmaceutical industry.

And they would place articles about, say, tranquilizers in Good Housekeeping or in Redbook or Vogue. And so they would say, these things, they’ll cure you if you’re feeling sad. They’ll bring you down if you’re feeling too up. They’ll help you want to have sex with your husband, again. It’ll help you feel happy at work. It’ll make the dishes look great.

They would just, literally, grab from the culture whatever was in the headlines, right then, that you were worried about. Juvenile delinquency? Ah, right, these pills will cure juvenile delinquency.

And these articles, because they were written, technically, by some science journalist, didn’t have to deal with the regulations and limitations of an advertisement, which had to tell the truth and had to tell both sides.

BRIAN: That’s great. Advertising was more objective than journalism.

DAVID HERZBERG: Oh yeah, today’s direct-to-consumer ads, as awful as so many people find them, are way better guides to whether you should use a drug than a Good Housekeeping article from 1957.

BRIAN: Wow.

DAVID HERZBERG: And so, on the one hand, these popular magazine articles really helped build the boom for the drugs, while, at the same time, in an unintended way, they helped spread the idea that women, in particular, were experiencing a lot of unhappiness and problems in their supposedly perfect world of suburbia.

BRIAN: And that idea was one that resonated with a very different group of people, feminists. They argued, that yes, many suburban women had come to depend on tranquilizers to get them through the day. But the problem wasn’t that they were sick. The problem was that these smart, capable women had abandoned their education and career goals in order to raise families. Their unhappiness was a natural response to their constrained circumstances.

DAVID HERZBERG: And throwing tranquilizers at them didn’t solve the problem. And because it didn’t solve the problem, they kept being prescribed the tranquilizers. And now, it’s produced widespread Valium addiction, which is a concrete sign that, to put it bluntly, sexism is bad for women. We’re not talking about hurt feelings. We’re not talking about stubbed toes. We’re talking about women becoming junkies.

BRIAN: These arguments first popped up in magazines that popularized feminism, magazines like Ms. But soon enough, they were finding spots in even more mainstream publications, the very ones that just a few years before had been publishing those glowing articles about Valium.

DAVID HERZBERG: I mean, one of the quotes says, just like the Puerto Rican junkie mainlining heroin in a rat infested tenement in Harlem, just to try to put every racially charged stereotype you could possibly pack into one sentence. And by conjuring up that kind of language, they’re able to remind people that addiction is a really exciting and titillating story. And then when you connect it to housewives, this is something that can move magazines.

BRIAN: Yet, I’m willing to bet that the housewives who did rally around this, and the feminists, were eager to distinguish themselves from those, another group that the media was really shining a lot of light on, people addicted to heroin, hard core drug addicts. My guess is that they really went to pains to distinguish themselves from that group.

ANNE FOSTER: Absolutely. And that’s one of the interesting things about this, that those kind of non-white or urban junkies were used as sensationalistic decoration in the articles. They were there to make it exciting. But it was also very clear that, in the language of some these articles and then some of the people who ended up testifying in Congress, these are very, quote, “different people” from us, who need very different kinds of treatment.

And so, in a way, an opportunity to broaden the critique of the politics of addiction. Basically, feminists were saying Valium addiction is a political issue, where women are being oppressed, and the result is Valium addiction. And so to treat Valium addiction, we don’t need to talk about the pathology of the women or what’s the matter with them and why they became addicts, because they’re essentially innocent. It is the forces that oppress that create the addiction.

They weren’t ready to make this argument about those Puerto Rican tenement dwellers mainlining heroin. And as a result, one of the ways that they were able to make this argument palatable, in a country that’s had all these racially charged drug wars for a century, is that they did, explicitly, say this is a unique situation, because it’s these sweet, innocent white women who are the victims. And that makes it unique.

BRIAN: So what’s the outcome? What’s the upshot of all of this, David? What happens after the hearings? What happens to Valium use, for instance?

DAVID HERZBERG: Valium use plummets. Now, it’s a little bit of a complicated story. The high point of Valium use seems to be 1973. And the addiction panic comes in the late ’70s. This is actually, strangely typical of drug addiction panics. They seem to happen after the problem has started to recede.

And so one thing that you can read from this is that the Valium addiction panic, you might say, was a successful public health response to overuse and potentially dangerous use of a tranquilizer, that it educated a large number of women, who then took steps to try to reduce their use of the drug. It educated physicians, who took steps to try to use it less. And the result was much less use of Valium.

And so, on the one hand, it can almost look like a success story, although there are a few caveats. A lot of medical experts, first off, they saw the Valium addiction panic as an overblown affair. While Valium became a symbol, a shorthand for medical sexism against suburban housewives, with the suburban housewives plight. In many medical circles, it became a shorthand for the medical system having lost a good drug by failing to navigate popular culture properly. This is a good drug. It can produce dependence, but it’s actually pretty hard to produce dependence with it.

BRIAN: So when something like Prozac comes along, does the Valium story affect the way Prozac is presented and marketed?

DAVID HERZBERG: I think it does, very much so. I’m not going to say it’s some conspiracy, where these guys study the Valium panic and figured out what language to use. But I would suggest that one of the reasons why Prozac is able to succeed is because the kinds of stories told about it respond to a lot of the critiques raised by the Valium panic. So that, for example, instead of being a sedative that makes women compliant and content with their current situation, it’s an energizing drug that’s often described as making them more assertive in the business world and more assertive in their personal life.

BRIAN: Empowering drug.

DAVID HERZBERG: An empowering drug. And Peter Kramer, who wrote the famous best seller, Listening to Prozac, even, at some point, calls it a feminist drug. Because of this quality it has of enabling women to seize control of their lives and do things that they haven’t been able to do before.

BRIAN: David Herzberg is a Professor of History At the University of Buffalo. His book is Happy Pills in America, from Milltown to Prozac.

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BRIAN: If you’d like to listen to more from my interview with David Herzberg, head on over to backstoryradio.org, where we’ve posted a longer version.

ED: And while you’re there, take a moment to help us out with next week’s show. To mark Barack Obama’s second inauguration, we’ll be looking back on some notable scenes from past inaugurations. Do you think these rituals really matter much, in the big scheme of things, or are they all just pomp and circumstance? Lead us comment on our website. Or if you really want to get old fashioned, give us a call. Our number is (888)257-8851.

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ED: It’s time for another short break. When we come back, how Sherlock Holmes kicked his coke habit, with a little help from his American fans.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.