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medical system generally.6 These widely circulated statistics made the addic- tion of millions seem a distinct possibility.

Most eminent figures in psychopharmacology dismissed this prospect as sensational nonsense.7 The epidemiologists whose numbers fueled the panic argued that Valium and other mood medicines were actually underprescribed— in part owing to the irresponsible media.8 By the 1980s, when the intensity had waned, scholars questioned why popular hysteria had unfairly maligned a safe and valuable medicine (“Where are all the tranquilizer junkies?” asked the Journal of the American Medical Association).9 The 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 antidepressant Prozac and the anti- anxiety drug Xanax—a pharmacological cousin of Valium—took Valium’s place as America’s leading psychotropes. (Japan, which saw no Valium panic, expe- rienced no such shift to antidepressants.11)

This was hardly America’s first drug panic, or the first to be decried as exaggerated and unnecessary. Sensationalist panics were a long-standing Ameri- can tradition, stretching from the temperance movement to the twentieth century’s “wars” against narcotics. And yet Valium’s defenders were 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. In- deed, antidrug rhetoric had long been an important tool for white middle- class cultural warriors looking to dramatize the threat posed by such “danger- ous classes” to “our” society.12 The Valium panic, on the other hand, involved a quintessentially middle-class drug prescribed legally by reputable physicians for their respectable patients, and was popularly recognized as an entrenched part of life in the comfortable classes, especially for women. Bogeymen from the “dangerous classes” had no role in this drama—and the usual antidrug coalition of government, middle-class cultural crusaders, and medical authori- ties 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 revised classic drug-scare narratives to sensationalize Valium addiction among affluent white women as a central symbol of sexism and its consequences, and they held up liberation from “mother’s little helper” as an archetypal story of emancipation through feminism. These stories “stuck” to Valium and remain fixed in popular memory about the drug even now, de- cades later.

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This was, in many respects, a remarkable campaign. It earned new audi- ences for feminist political messages in mass-market media such as Good House- keeping, Redbook, Vogue, and other places not usually considered feminist bul- warks. Its politically charged sympathy toward addicts challenged the punitive logic of the twentieth century’s “war against 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 anti- drug tradition. Valium crusaders came from the ranks of feminists most inter- ested in galvanizing white, middle-class women—the cultural quarters where the tranquilizer was most familiar. Part of their success came from their will- ingness to trade on assumptions of these women’s essential innocence in a way that excluded—and even reified—the “dangerous classes” as a different sort of drug user. This was hardly a surprising approach given the campaign’s goals. Anti-Valium crusaders did not set out to engender a broad-based reorienta- tion of the “war against drugs.” And yet, their success in reworking the anti- drug tradition for their own ends challenges us to imagine exactly that: a “war against drugs” rebuilt as a civil rights campaign, challenging rather than rein- forcing cultural stereotypes.

This imaginative task has broad relevance for the study of twentieth-cen- tury American culture. Recent scholarship has persuasively argued for the central importance of drugs and drug control in shaping modern global and Ameri- can 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.13 Meanwhile, campaigns against drug traffick- ing have proved useful as well, providing cultural justification for Anglo-Ameri- can 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 dramatizing cultural distinctions between social groups in the United States.14

In focusing on illicit drugs, this scholarship has largely ignored legal medi- cines 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. Consideration of such “psychotropic medicines” has instead fallen to a different body of literature. The work of Jonathan Metzl, David Healy, and contemporary observers such as Peter Kramer and Carl Elliott has begun

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to place the psychotropes culturally. They have argued that the pervasive pills opened up new opportunities for renegotiating identity, sometimes—as Metzl argues—to reinforce existing stereotypes, sometimes—as Kramer contends— to resist them.15 This work, however, has focused almost exclusively on profes- sional medical cultures (physicians and patients), thus mirroring other drug scholarship in tacitly hewing to, if not necessarily accepting, 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 resistance opened up in the resulting architecture of distinction. In particular, the Valium epi- sode shows how the cultural tools of antidrug warriors could become available to different groups pursuing their own agendas, some of which posed chal- lenges to the accepted logic of the twentieth century’s “drug wars.” But such opportunities for resistance were limited in subtle and powerful ways. Because drug discourses were so racially charged, 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 America’s 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 efforts established racially charged lines dividing “medi- cines” from “dope.” Prescription medicines became open to public scrutiny only in the 1960s and early 1970s, when a number of different groups chal- lenged those neat divisions and opened a rare window of opportunity for re- thinking drug-war politics. These two chapters in American drug history pro- vide 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 “De- mon Rum.” Temperance was the main antidrug campaign, battling the evils

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of alcohol and—especially later in the century—the working-class ethnics pre- sumed to be under its sway. Morphine, meanwhile, was a godsend painkiller dispensed legally by physicians to respectable patients, or sold directly to con- sumers through patent medicines. True, some observers were already denounc- ing opium-smoking “Orientals” in the west and, after the Civil War, drug- crazed African American men in the south. But no organized antidrug campaign emerged to match temperance, and, for the most part, medical therapeutics remained the primary frame for understanding opiates and other drugs. Ad- diction was considered a wretched or even contemptible state, but was under- stood to be a private affair of 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 de- mographics of drug use shifted. The American Medical Association (AMA) campaigned vigorously to reduce physicians’ prescriptions of opiates, and “muckraking” journalists exposed the worst practices of patent medicine com- panies. By the early twentieth century, these two main sources of drugs had begun to dry up, and the number of addicts from the respectable classes dropped dramatically. This left other, previously less noticeable groups to become the public face of American drug use: immigrants, urban workers, petty crimi- nals, and others in the racially mixed milieus of America’s burgeoning “urban vice districts.”17

By the 1920s, when drugs (now including the recently discovered heroin and cocaine) had become fully associated with the “dangerous classes,” 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 charged class and race politics of the temperance movement, blam- ing nonwhite, poor, and other suspect populations for the horrors of addic- tion. Police, not medical authorities, assumed responsibility for drug control. Over the next decades—the “classic” era of drug control—the federal Narcot- ics Bureau led an enormously influential public relations campaign that, with help from sensation-hungry journalists, circulated scare stories blaming des- perate and violent dope fiends for robberies, muggings, and urban moral de- generacy. 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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Ignored during this “classic” era was the continued existence of a different kind of drug user: a legal drug culture of white, middle-class Americans whose physicians supplied them with potentially addictive barbiturate sedatives and amphetamine stimulants—legal medical replacements of sorts for opiates and cocaine.19 The number of “medical addicts” 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 press or the courts.20 This 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 le- gally 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 rather than a criminal act enjoyed new public support from the American Medical Association and the Ameri- can Bar Association, and even received formal sanction from the Supreme Court in 1962.22 Along with these challenges to drug-war verities came a blur- ring 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 federal regulation of barbiturates and amphetamines in 1965.23 A 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 for- merly unimpeachable reputations of pharmaceutical companies and physi- cians came under new criticism. Congressional hearings and investigative jour- nalists 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.25 Reported one former drug salesman to the National Council of Churches, which held its own pub- lic investigation of the drug industry: “The biggest dope dealer in your com-

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munity today may well be the good old family doctor, and the pusher supply- ing him is the tranquilizer manufacturer.”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 vis- ible members of the counterculture, eager to justify their own drug use, de- lighted in drawing parallels with their parents’ mood-modifying habits. In San Francisco’s famous Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, for example, a drug- scene hangout called “The Drogstore” was decorated as a conventional phar- macy, mocking mainstream culture while also laying an absurdist claim upon it.27 The Rolling Stones drove home a similar point with their hit song “Mother’s Little Helper” in 1966. As one prominent new-generation drug scholar noted, “every time 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 prescrip- tion medicines. Beyond the ethical drive to address what 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 respect- ability, and rising cultural visibility during the 1970s’ “rehab chic,” these phy- sicians 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’s use of alcohol and other drugs, pointing to the continuity of behavior between taking medicines and “doing” drugs.30 In 1972, the Consumer’s Union (publisher of Consumer Reports) issued one of its respected product-rating references dedicated 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 as- sumptions. The title said it all: Licit and Illicit Drugs: The Consumers Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens, and Marijuana—Including Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol.31 Given the polemical history of drugs in America, the appearance (and popularity) of this even- handed, calmly written mainstream book offered striking evidence of the cul-

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tural change under way. For the first time in nearly half 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 barbiturates and amphetamines, and bearing many of the hallmarks of a classic drug panic. A 1967 article in Look magazine, for example, informed readers that 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” Ameri- cans who “can’t sleep, wake up or feel comfortable without drugs.” Using prescriptions as an escape hatch, “serious drug 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 apple- pie 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 chal- lenges of racial integration, and addiction easily took its place as the latest wave of “inner-city” encroachments on “normal” America, jumbled along with school bussing, African Americans moving to the suburbs, and even the inter- racial marriage in such movies as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. These racial issues were interlaced with other middle-class anxieties—about changing so- cial 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. Business Week, for example, warned in 1970 that “if you think the ‘drug culture’ is pretty much restricted to the campus or the ghetto, you might find some surprises by taking a look around your office—and maybe even at yourself.” Why? Because “some of 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.”33 The New York Times opened a five-part 1968 series by announcing: “A Growing Number of America’s Elite Are Quietly ‘Turning On.’”34 A respected drug epidemiologist, noting that women were the primary users of barbiturates and amphetamines, sum- marized the picture for Ladies’ Home Journal readers in 1971: “Times Square prostitutes” and other fringe elements were not the nation’s only or even most

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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 reports highlighted 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 pleasures of 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 “accidental middle class ad- dicts” 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 irresistible drugs.”36 Look summarized it bluntly: “The trouble lies not in the pills, but in the people.”37 Many articles empha- sized that pill poppers, not their physicians, were the problem, “talk[ing] doc- tors into writing prescriptions,” forging prescriptions, or even stealing to main- tain their habit.38

Perhaps the most intriguing counterpoint to the invasion narrative was a genuinely new cultural space opened up by these stories: what one writer for Atlantic Monthly described as the “white-collar drug scene.” “Sometimes pill- takers meet other pill-takers, and an odd thing happens,” he explained. “In- stead of using the drugs to cope with the world, they begin to use their time to take drugs. Taking drugs becomes something to 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 Physician’s Desk Reference—and reading its comically staid medical descriptions of each drug’s uses.39 The New York Times similarly described affluent pill swallowers as part of their own “drug scene” 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.”40 This notion of a white and affluent prescription-drug culture also made its way into the era’s popular literature, for example, in Joan Didion’s stylish novel Play It As It Lays (1970) and Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966, made into a movie in 1967). In these classic period pieces, barbiturates were a ubiquitous and unquestioned option for wealthy, fashionable, but miserable women protagonists.41

However unhappy or unpleasant, these drug “scenes” were far removed from the hothouses of deviance, violence, and perverse interracial sex featured prominently in drug stories from the classic era of narcotics control. If their

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denizens were not exactly pillars of middle-class morality, neither did they appear to be grossly abnormal. Indeed, what made them objects of fascination was their seeming typicality, suggesting not individual aberration but a classwide failure of values. Journalistic descriptions of them opened a long-ignored cul- tural space in the saga of addiction, one that dramatized troubles entirely in- ternal to the nation’s comfortable classes rather than posed from without by fiendish “pushers.”42 It still emphasized a seemingly natural split between medical and “street” addicts, but did so in a way that brought out parallels— particularly in 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 funda- mentally different from medicines and medicine users. Some of these chal- lenges were more radical than others, and most continued to traffic in classic drug-war racial stereotypes, but taken together they represented a noteworthy reconceptualization of American drug politics. As we will see, when it emerged a few years later, the Valium panic would build on both aspects of this incon- clusive 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-drug addiction scare of the early 1970s, Valium and other minor tranquilizers received virtually no mention. Roche Pharmaceutical’s vigorous lobbying staved off “scheduling” for its flagship drug Valium until 1975, and ubiquitous advertising helped maintain the medicine’s reputation in both medical and popular circles as safe, effective, and useful. Warnings in the FDA-approved texts of advertisements and the Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR), for example, continued to emphasize only the risks of prescribing for “dependence-prone” individuals, and conventional medical authorities still viewed the drug’s addictive dangers skeptically. The most widely cited medical reference on Valium was a 1973 review in JAMA that praised it precisely because “tolerance, abuse, and abstinence are very rare.”43 No 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 prescriptions were for refills that did not require new authori-

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zation from a physician—a considerably higher 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 reached an agreement with the Drug Enforcement Administration that enrolled Valium on the Schedule of Con- trolled Substances.45 That same year, the recently created Drug Abuse Warn- ing Network, a federal statistics-gathering organization, identified Valium as the single most common drug discovered in overdose victims 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 Marie Nyswander, they brought to addiction treatment the logic of the women’s health movement, a pillar of the patients’ rights movement focused on expos- ing the medical system’s role 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 Vogue magazine, for example, that Valium dependency was “a far worse addiction than heroin, morphine, or meperidine (Demerol),” and a greater threat than those other drugs because of its widespread use, particularly among women. In the article, titled “Dan- ger Ahead! Valium: The Pill You Love Can Turn on You,” she explained that “today, probably it would be very hard to find any group of middle class women in which some aren’t regularly on Valium.”47

By the late 1970s, scores of alarmist articles in dozens of popular magazines spread word of the Valium menace. Television’s most respected news program, 60 Minutes, ran a feature on it, and Ann Landers educated readers about it in her nationally syndicated advice column. Three congressional investigations explored the issue, most visibly Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1979 hearings de- voted entirely to “use and misuse” of Valium and Librium. Along with jour- nalists’ reports came book-length exposés, one—Stopping Valium—from Ralph Nader’s Health Research Group.48

Most important in shaping this media sensation were feminists seeking to highlight middle-class women’s problems. Their ranks were drawn from many different parts of second-wave feminism, including women’s addiction spe- cialists, the women’s health movement, and ordinary women who met to dis- cuss Valium in neighborhood “consciousness raising” 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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women of the comfortable classes. Betty Friedan was one of the first to pursue this strategy. Indeed, Friedan’s famous “problem that has no name” resembled nothing more than the symptoms of psychological distress for which tranquil- izers were widely marketed and used: “mild, undiagnosable symptoms” of “malaise, nervousness, and fatigue,” “a tired feeling,” and so forth. According to Friedan, well-educated and materially comfortable women had been mis- led into believing that these problems were medical rather than political, and, as a result, “many suburban housewives were taking tranquilizers like cough drops.” And, indeed, one ubiquitous element of postwar medical discourse— drug advertisements—often highlighted housewives’ misery only to suggest “curing” it with pills, not feminism [see images]. But the suffering was not medical, Friedan warned, and while a housewife’s “anxiety can 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’s protagonists had sacrificed their own potential accomplishments on the altar of housewifedom, and vague, ambiguous anxieties—and tranquilizers—were one of many consequences.49

Tranquilizers worked as a political symbol to focus attention on the prob- lems of the white and well educated because Valium and its predecessors had long been understood to “belong” to women of society’s upper 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.50 As one might expect, narratives about 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 therapy with tranquilizers.51 It is worth noting that these particular gender stereotypes, like tranquilizer use itself, had always been 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 emo- tional weakness or pathology, but because pharmaceutical companies had “medicalized” these grievances to sell drugs, working hand-in-hand with a

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sexist society resistant to women’s lib- eration. Why should women “emo- tionally readjust” to a demeaning and depressing situation? Not medical

therapy to individuals, but political “therapy” for society at large, was the an- swer. As one witness at congressional hearings in 1971 suggested, “tired moth- ers 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 advantage of the cultural fascination with drugs long encouraged by antidrug warriors to reach new audiences. Mass-market women’s maga- zines were not known as feminist pioneers, for example, but it was in their pages—in Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and others— that the Valium addiction drama largely unfolded.

The kinds of narratives generated by women’s-media journalists can be use- fully examined through the stories of America’s two 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 experi- ences with Valium became archetypes thanks to media coverage of their sto-

Figure 1. 1968 ad for the tranquilizer, Miltown, Journal of the American Medical Association 203 (5): January 29, 1968, p. 54-55.

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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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ries and the best-selling memoirs both women pub- lished in the late 1970s.

Betty Ford had been a dutiful, energetic, and (by her own admission) hard-

drinking politician’s wife for years when in the mid-1960s, her physicians prescribed painkillers for a pinched neck nerve. For the next decade she was never without pills. After her husband’s brief stint as president, Ford remained in the public eye, but friends (and reporters) noticed a change in the once- vivacious woman. She appeared visibly drunk or sedated in her public appear- ances, most disastrously in a 1977 visit to Russia, where she was to narrate the Nutcracker ballet. She would later recall that visit as a pill-induced “fog”; one U.S. journalist noted her “sloe-eyed and 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 rehabilitation program in Long Beach. “It’s an insidious thing,” she said, “and I mean to rid myself of its damaging effects.”54 Her son, Steve, told reporters that his mother was fighting “a very rough battle against the effects of Valium

Figure 3. 1969 ad for Valium, Journal of the American College Health Association 17(5): June 1969, reprinted in U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Monopoly of the Select Committee on Small Business, Advertising of Proprietary Medicines, Part 2: Mood Drugs (Sedatives, Tranquilizers, and Stimulants (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1971), Appendix II.

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and alcohol.”55 After 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 bravely gone public with her battle against breast cancer. 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

Barbara Gordon, an award-winning television documentary filmmaker, was a different kind of public figure. Unmarried and childless, she loved the pro- fessional freedom she had to pursue her political and artistic passions. Despite this, she described herself in her best-selling memoir (later a movie) as suffer- ing 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

Jarred by a friend’s death and frightened by her growing reliance on Valium, Gordon decided impulsively to throw her Valium away for good. Her psychia- trist, she later recalled, was angry about her decision and suggested that she switch to a more powerful drug—the antipsychotic Stelazine. When she re- fused, 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 psy- chotic episodes that landed her in a mental hospital twice over the next year. After grueling but enlightening “talk” therapy in the institution, she finally emerged pill and anxiety free, eager to warn other women about the risks of Valium.

Ford’s and Gordon’s stories as told in the media and by the women them- selves highlight the three most important narrative dynamics of the Valium- addiction genre. First, neither woman was portrayed as at fault for her condi- tion. They may have been ignorant of the risks, but they weren’t seeking a “high” and harbored no hidden character flaws 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 “damaging effects.” Gordon’s suspicions 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’s anger and despite the suffering her decision caused her.

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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 difficulty of adjusting to a husband’s constant career moves, and so forth. Or they prescribed for seemingly random reasons, such as vagi- nal infections, skin rashes, or “premenopausal anxiety.”58 Barbara Gordon, for example, portrayed her uncaring and condescending psychiatrist as having practically forced Valium on her, dismissing her fears of dependence with a brusque assurance that “it’s not addictive, and you don’t have to worry about it.” As she told People magazine, women should be wary of trusting their phy- sicians: “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 “a great deal of money providing these quick panaceas for 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’s more frequent visits to physicians “puts [them] in much greater jeopardy” than men.60

Gordon’s call for women to stop being “docile patients” and become politi- cally aware advocates for their own interests highlights the third central ele- ment of the Valium addiction genre: feminism as a solution to addiction. The transformation from passive patient to assertive participant echoed the tactic of “consciousness raising” as adapted by the women’s health movement, whose members sought to educate themselves so that they could negotiate more ef- fectively with medical authority, or even circumvent it altogether.

Combining this approach with 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, strategies for recognizing what drug a physician was prescribing, how to question the decision if necessary, and where to look for addiction treatment if the physician resisted. McCall’s, 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 strategies were not only rhetorical. As former Valium 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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tation programs based on feminist principles. Maginnis herself had helped create one such program, Women-Together, out of her local consciousness- raising 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 individuals through feminist consciousness raising. 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 cam- paigns demonized addicts, pointing to defective character as the cause of drug use and sensationalizing the addicts’ threat to “normal” society. The Valium scare embodied the sympathetic, humane, and politically sophisticated ap- proach long favored by progressive drug reformers but rarely seen in actual practice. Rather than using addiction to air negative stereotypes of drug users, feminists used addiction to dramatize the hardships faced by essentially inno- cent Valium-using women in a sexist society. Instead of punishment for ad- dicts, they called for greater political awareness and assertiveness. Their suc- cess in reining in Valium use through such tactics makes this panic an important but almost entirely overlooked alternative to the punitive antidrug policies studied by scholars and implemented by policymakers.

After several years of public criticism, Valium’s days as a wonder drug—and as America’s most-prescribed medicine—came to a decisive end. Use of the drug declined steeply at the end of the 1970s to under 60 million prescrip- tions per year; this was less than half the mid-1970s’ peak volume, despite population growth.63 National opinion surveys suggested that this decline was accompanied by increasingly conservative attitudes about Valium use. While manufacturers of other tranquilizers quickly stepped in to fill the medical and commercial niche (advertisers for Abbott Laboratory’s Tranxene, for example, touted it as a nonaddictive Valium replacement64), Valium’s downfall reflected feminists’ broader success in redefining tranquilizer use itself. The next suc- cessful “wonder drug for the mind”—the antidepressant Prozac—would be presented by its champions as nearly the opposite of Valium: it was a stimu- lant, not a relaxant, and its most famous proponent, psychiatrist Peter Kramer, 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 impressive if no Valium threat ever actually existed. But to say that Valium’s critics 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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cause dependence if used regularly for a long enough period of time.66 Regular 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 pro- portions would have meant a significant problem. A respected national 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 represented a 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, middle- class women addicts. The vast majority of popular media stories followed Betty Ford and Barbara Gordon’s example in being quite explicit about this, de- scribing corporate wives and professional women suffering horrible withdrawal in “decorator-furnished living rooms” and “ordinary suburbs.” The quote from the FDA Consumer that began this article was a classic example, deploying “junkies” and “street people” for shock value but also to underscore the white- ness and affluence of the Valium addicts.

This dynamic is captured perfectly by Cynthia Maginnis’s testimony before Congress. The story she told followed a classic arc: unhappy housewife to Valium addict to consciousness-raised founder 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 referral cases.” It was, she continued, an important alternative to pro- grams “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 wit- ness at the hearing voiced similar concerns, complaining about the “humiliat- ing” red tape of traditional rehabilitation programs and pleading for alterna- tives to regimens “targeted to 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 shared her back- ground. 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 available narra- tive, one that cast white, middle-class women as innocent and pure. Her plea to understand “people like her” echoed the travails of professional women and white-collar housewives suffering from “the problem that has no name.”

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One of the central claims of the Valium affair was, in essence, that these white-collar problems, and thus Valium addiction, were fundamentally differ- ent from those of the “street junkies” used as sensationalist decorations in the stories. To accept feminism as a drug policy for Valium did not imply accept- ing political awakening and activism across the board as a solution to the nation’s drug problems. Like other historical instances of what George Lipsitz calls a “possessive investment in whiteness,” the terms of this cultural transac- tion were clear.69 Anti-Valium campaigners succeeded 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 “war against drugs.” That this approach was so effective is an instructive lesson in the challenges facing those who would build cross-class and cross-race alliances.

By the 1980s, when the Valium affair (and Valium use) had waned, the politi- cal atmosphere surrounding drugs in America had also changed. Few influen- tial voices still blamed social injustice rather than addicts for the nation’s drug problems, as resurgent antidrug warriors rallied around simple enunciations of personal responsibility and 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) “Just Say No.” If there truly had been a window of opportunity for organizing a broad-based challenge to drug-war politics in the 1970s—a big if—it certainly seemed to have closed a decade later.

Ultimately, the Valium scare deserves attention on two grounds. As an epi- sode in drug history, it offers an alternative template for cultural responses to a perceived drug problem—one that encourages less punitive, and possibly more effective, medical and regulatory campaigns. 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-wave feminism, it offers a 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 powerful political 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 inclusive effort to define and combat the social underpinnings of addiction.

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N o t e s 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.

1. “Tranquilizers: Use, Abuse, and Dependency,” FDA Consumer, October 1978, 21. 2. “Danger Ahead! Valium: The Pill You Love Can Turn on You,” Vogue, February 1975, 152–53. 3. Barbara Gordon, 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. 4. 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’s Dependency on Prescription Drugs (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1979).

5. U.S. Department of Commerce, Drug Utilization in the U.S.—1985; Seventh Annual Review (Spring- field, Va.: National Technical Information Service, 1986).

6. Hugh Parry, Mitchell Balter, Glen Mellinger, Ira Cisin, and Dean Manheimer, “National Patterns of Psychotherapeutic Drug Use,” AMA Archives of General Psychiatry 28.6 (June 1973): 769–83.

7. See, e.g., Leo Hollister at al., “Valium: A Discussion of Current Issues,” Psychosomatics, January- February-March 1977, 47, and Frank Ayd, “Benzodiazepines: Dependence and Withdrawal” [edito- rial], JAMA 242.13 (September 28, 1979): 1401–402. For a popular overview, see Gilbert Cant, “Valiumania,” New York Times Magazine, February 1, 1976, 34, 44.

8. See, e.g., Dean Manheimer et al., “Popular Attitudes and Beliefs about Tranquilizers,” American Jour- nal of Psychiatry, November 1973, 1253.

9. Elizabeth Rasche Gonzáles, “Where Are All the Tranquilizer Junkies?” JAMA 269.19 (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 Tranquilizer Use: The Role of the Social Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1991); Mickey Smith, A Social History of the Minor Tranquilizers: The Quest for 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 Medi- cine and Allied Sciences 52.3 (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.

10. Janice Clinthorne, Ira Cisin, Mitchell Balter, Glen Mellinger, and Eberhard Uhlenhuth, “Changes in Popular Attitudes and Beliefs About Tranquilizers, 1970–1979,” AMA Archives of General Psychiatry 43.6 (June 1986): 527–32.

11. Laurence J. Kirmayer, “The Sound of One Hand Clapping: Listening to Prozac in Japan,” in Prozac as a Way of Life, ed. Carl Elliot and Tod Chambers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 164–93.

12. 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 Nar- cotic Control, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Nancy D. Campbell, Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2000); Caroline Jean Acker, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Curtis Marez, Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

13. David Courtwright, Forces of 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.

14. Marez, Drug Wars; Musto, The American Disease; Campbell, Using Women; Acker, Creating the Ameri- can Junkie.

15. Jonathan Metzl, Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); David Healy, The Antidepressant Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1997), and The Creation of Psychopharmacology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

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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.

16. David Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Acker, Creating the American Junkie, 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 Mikalàs Teich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114–32; Musto, The American Disease.

17. Courtwright, Dark Paradise; Acker, “From All Purpose Anodyne to Marker of Deviance.” 18. Musto, The American Disease. As Campbell’s 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.

19. Charles O. Jackson, “Before the Drug Culture: Barbiturate/Amphetamine Abuse in American Soci- ety,” Clio Medica 11.1 (April 1976): 47–58; Acker, Creating the American Junkie, 125–55.

20. Anslinger interview with Musto, cited in Musto, The American Disease, 213. 21. 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 addic- tive criminal use. See Susan Speaker, Too Many Pills: Patients, Physicians, and the Myth of Overmedication in America, 1955–1980 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1992), and Charles O. Jack- son, “Before the Drug Culture: Barbiturate/Amphetamine Abuse in American Society,” Clio Medica 11.1 (April 1976): 47–58; Acker, Creating the American Junkie, 125–55.

22. Drug Addiction: Crime or Disease? Interim and Final Reports of the Joint Committee of the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association on Narcotic Drugs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961); Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 1962.

23. U.S. Public Law 74, 89th Cong., 1st sess., July 15, 1965. 24. See, e.g., Hugh Parry, “Use of Psychotropic Drugs by U.S. Adults,” Public Health Reports 83.10 (Oc-

tober 1968): 799–810, and Parry et al., “National Patterns.” 25. Morton Mintz, The Therapeutic Nightmare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965). See also, e.g., Harold

Schmeck, “Nader Group Sees Pressure on FDA: Asks Congressional Inquiry on Industry’s Influence,” New York Times, April 3, 1972, 30; John Pekkanen, The American Connection: Profiteering and Poli- ticking 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 congres- sional inquiries, see U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee on the Judiciary, Administered Prices in the Drug Industry (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1959–1961); U.S. Sen- ate, Subcommittee on Monopoly of the Committee on Small Business, Competitive Problems in the Drug Industry (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1969), and Advertising of Proprietary Medicines (Washing- ton, D.C.: GPO, 1971); U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Examination of the Pharmaceutical Industry (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1974); Use and 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 Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 379–420.

26. Reginald Bowes, “The Industry as Pusher,” Journal of Drug Issues 4.3 (Summer 1974): 238; the full hearings were published in the Summer 1974 and Winter 1976 volumes of the journal.

27. Anthony Lukas, “The Drug Scene: Dependence Grows,” New York Times, January 8, 1968, 22. 28. Joel Fort, The Pleasure Seekers: The Drug Crisis, Youth, and Society (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969),

195–96. For overviews of “counterculture” drug use, see John Burnham, Bad Habits: Drinking, Smok- ing, Taking Drugs, 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).

29. William White, Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America (Bloomington, Ill.: Chestnut Health Systems, 1998), 263–78.

30. See, e.g., Reginald Smart and Dianne Fejer, “Drug Abuse among Adolescents and Their Parents: Closing the Generation Gap in Mood Modification,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 79.2 (April 1972): 153–60.

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31. Edward Brecher, Licit and Illicit Drugs (Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Consumers Union, 1972). 32. Roland Berg, “Drugs: The Mounting Menace of Abuse,” Look, August 8, 1967, 11–28. 33. “Drug Culture: Take a Look at Your Office,” Business Week, August 15, 1970, 83. 34. Martin Arnold, “The Drug Scene: A Growing Number of America’s Elite Are Quietly ‘Turning On,’”

New York Times, January 10, 1968, 26. 35. Carl Chambers and Dodi Schultz, “Women and Drugs,” Ladies Home Journal, November 1971, 191. 36. Sam Blum, “Pills That Make You Feel Better,” Redbook, August 1968, 125. 37. Berg, “The Mounting Menace of Abuse,” 11–28. 38. Chambers and Schultz, “Housewives and the Drug Habit,” Ladies Home Journal, December 1971,

138. 39. Bruce Jackson, “White-Collar Pill Party,” in Observations of Deviance, ed. Jack Douglas (New York:

Random House, 1970), 256–59. 40. Lukas, “The Drug Scene,” 22. 41. Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1970); Jacqueline

Susann, Valley of the Dolls (New York: Bantam Books, 1966). 42. Some nineteenth-century observers, such as eminent neurologist George Beard, saw a special predilec-

tion for addiction (“inebriety”) among the nation’s elite as part of their overall susceptibility to “neur- asthenia.” See George Beard, American Nervousness (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881).

43. Barry Blackwell, “Psychotropic Drugs in Use Today: The Role of Diazepam in Medical Practice,” JAMA 225.13 (September 24, 1973): 1640.

44. Refill numbers were tracked by the trade journal American Druggist in its fortnightly prescription surveys.

45. See Proclamation 7174, Federal Register 31 (17 May 1966); Proclamation 17474, Federal Register 32 (6 December 1967); Proclamation 7968, Federal Register (21 May 1969); Proclamation 2557-8, Fed- eral Register 34 (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 York Times, January 31, 1975, 57; “The Growing Debate Over Safety of Drugs,” U.S. News & World Report, June 16, 1975, 61–62.

46. See “Federal Agency Lists Most Widely Abused Drugs,” JAMA 236.5 (August 2, 1976): 432. 47. “Danger Ahead!” 152–53. See also Nyswander quoted in John Lombardi, “Valium: The Popcorn of

the 1970s,” Oui magazine, September 1976, 96, and Penelope McMillan, “Women and Tranquiliz- ers,” Ladies Home Journal, November 1976, 164–67.

48. Eve Bargmann et al., Stopping Valium (Washington, D.C.: Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, 1982); Richard Hughes and Robert Brewin, The Tranquilizing of America: Pill-Popping and the Ameri- can Way of Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).

49. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 20–21, 31, 293, 314. See Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

50. Francis Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community (Urbana: Univer- sity of Illinois Press, 1987), esp. 10–11, 30–32, 83–84; Barbara Sicherman, “The Uses of a Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and Neurasthenia,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32.1 (Janu- ary 1977): 33–54.

51. See, e.g., Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); I. K. Broverman et al., “Sex Role Stereotypes and Clinical Judgments of Mental Health,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 34.1 (February 1970): 1–7; Jean Lennane and John Lennane, “Alleged Psychogenic Disor- ders 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,” Jour- nal of Health and Social Behavior 12.3 (September 1971): 238–44.

52. Robert Seidenberg quoted in Advertising of Proprietary Medicines, 551. For a sampling of similar arguments, see Pauline Bart, “Depression in Middle-Aged Women,” in Woman in Sexist Society: Stud- ies in Power and Powerlessness, ed. Vivian Bornick and Barbara Moran (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 163–86; and W. R. Gove and J. F. Tudor, “Adult Sex Roles and Mental Illness,” American Journal of Sociology 78.4 (January 1973): 812–35; Jane Prather and Linda Fidell, “Sex Differences in the Con- tent 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 Society 32 (May 1, 1975): 265–67; F. Suffet and R. Brotman, “Female Drug

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Use: Some Observations,” International Journal of Addictions 11.1 (January 1976): 31; Elissa Henderson Mosher, “Portrayal of Women in Drug Advertising: A Medical Betrayal,” Journal of Drug Issues 6.1 (Winter 1976): 72–78; Tona Kiefer, “The ‘Neurotic Woman’ Syndrome,” The Progressive, December 1980, 23–29.

53. Betty Ford with Chris Chase, Betty: A Glad Awakening (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987), 39–50; see also “Prisoner of Pills,” Newsweek, April 24, 1978; “Betty’s Ordeal,” Time, April 24, 1978; “Trouble: Betty Ford and Drugs,” People April 24, 1978, 49; Byra MacPherson, “Betty Ford: The Untold Story,” McCall’s, July 1978, 18; “Mrs. Ford’s Hospital Stay Linked to Medications,” New York Times, April 12, 1978, A13; “Mrs. Ford’s Illness Described,” New York Times, April 16, 1978, 24; Boyce Rensberger, “Abuse of Prescription Drugs: A Serious but Hidden Problem for Women,” New York Times, 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, Betty Ford: Woman of Courage (New York: Dale Books, 1978); Sheila Weidenfeld, First Lady’s Lady: With the Fords at the White House (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979).

54. “Betty’s Ordeal,” 31. 55. Muriel Nellis, “In Her Own Words,” People, May 8, 1978, 102. 56. McCall’s, for example, reported that a Cleveland treatment program received more than one hundred

calls the day after Ford’s press conference—a tenfold increase from its usual pace (MacPherson, “Betty Ford,” 18).

57. Gordon, Dancing As Fast As I Can, 16. 58. 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 York Times, 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.

59. Barbara Gordon, “In Her Own Words: Addicted to Valium,” People, June 18, 1979, 92, 97–98. 60. Nellis, “In Her Own Words,” 106. 61. 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,” Harper’s Bazaar, January 1980, 100–101.

62. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Women’s Dependency on Prescription Drugs, September 13, 1970, 96th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1970), 4–7.

63. 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.

64. See, e.g., Medical World News, 23.11 (May 1982): 20–22: Tranxene “helps avoid effects that encour- age 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.”

65. Kramer, Listening to Prozac. 66. See, e.g., Hannes Petursson and Malcolm Lader, Dependence on Tranquilizers (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1984), 93, and John Marks, The Benzodiazepines: Use, Overuse, Misuse, Abuse (Lancaster, U.K.: MTP Press Limited, 1985), 34–35.

67. Glen Mellinger and Mitchell Balter, “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 Biomedi- cal Press, 1981), 117–35. See also, e.g., David Greenblatt, Richard Shader, and Jan Koch-Weser, “Psychotropic Drug Use in Boston Area,” Archives of General Psychiatry 32.4 (April 1975): 519, which found that 4.5 percent of all new patients surveyed had been regularly taking minor tranquilizers for more than a year.

68. U.S. Congress, “Women’s Dependency,” 12. 69. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

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