Happy Fiftieth Birthday Valium - by Will Nicholl

A recent report published by the charity MIND – which paints a troubling, and important portrait of Britons driven to alcohol, cigarettes and prescription medication to differing extents by the stress of working-life – makes it a prescient moment to cast the mind back to a series of very strange goings-on. The time was the late 1950s, the place a hospital canteen in the North of England. Perhaps pickings in that week’s British Medical Journal had been lean – or patients that day exasperating – because the topic of conversation was a newspaper article about a Swiss circus-master who had found a drug to calm his tigers. A series of regrettable decisions – which still piece together to make faint sense, like fragments of an argument remembered after a long lunch – prompted one young doctor to phone the drug’s manufacturer. His offer was to test the compound, and its predecessor, on the then unwitting inhabitants of Sheffield. After he, and others, relayed the positive results to Hoffman La Roche, Valium – a drug which might otherwise have remained the preserve of big cats – was marketed in the UK in 1963. Few decisions have proved more detrimental to the reputation of young doctors – or damaging to popular culture – than this show of youthful over-enthusiasm. Still known as Mother’s Little Helper – but more likely to be given to nervous air passengers, than the anxious housewives who The Rolling Stones describe in their song – Valium has been es...
Source: PharmaGossip - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs