What Are Drugs For?

"Awoman gnaws at her nails: one hand in her mouth, the other clutching the shaft of a mop, which serves as one bar of a prison cell composed of cleaning products. It's an apt metaphor. In mid-century America, housewives were expected to polish their own gilded cages without considering how their feelings of entrapment might be related to their imprisonment in suburban homes. But by the late 1960s, even advertisers recognized that women might find such lives a little upsetting after reading The Feminine Mystique."

"The aforementioned woman is a model in a 1967 ad for a tranquilizer called Miltown. The ad acknowledged that the drug "cannot change her environment...but it can help relieve the anxiety" caused by her conditions. Ten years prior, Miltown had swept the market, selling over a billion units in the decade after Wallace Laboratories debuted it. In ads for Miltown, pharmaceutical copy suggested an incompatibility between liberatory social movements and surviving the suburbs might be to blame for a woman's anxious distress."

"P.E. Moskowitz deftly deconstructs this ad in a scathing examination of today's psychopharmaceutical industrial complex in their third and newest book, Breaking Awake: A Reporter's Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs. A memoir of their own breakdown and attempted recovery via psychopharmaceuticals, recreational drugs, and political education, the book is a compendium of psychiatric historiography and field reporting that explores issues they frequently cover in their popular substack newsletter, Mental Hellth."

A woman in a 1967 Miltown ad is depicted gnawing her nails behind a mop that forms a prison bar of cleaning products, symbolizing suburban domestic entrapment. The advertisement acknowledges that the tranquilizer cannot change her environment...but it can help relieve the anxiety. Miltown sold over a billion units within a decade of its debut, and marketing framed pills as solutions to social discomfort rather than remedies for structural problems. Psychiatric and pharmaceutical practices tranquilized women's attempts to transcend social roles, pathologized racialized resistance, and erected a racist divide between the 'addict' and the 'patient.'

Read at The Nation