Happiness by Prescription

In Beverly Hills a woman patient asked her doctor for a prescription for a popular tranquilizing drug. The pills, she explained, were for her daughter, who needed them to get through the trying first week of her honeymoon. In Boston a sunburned blonde asked her druggist for a bottle of "happiness pills." Said she: "I just got back from Florida, and everybody down there gets them."

From the mental hospitals, where reserpine and derivatives of chlorpromazine provided one of the century's great breakthroughs in psychiatry (TIME, March 7, 1955), the use of the tranquilizers has spread to masses of mine-run neurotics and other people vexed with problems and pressures. For a time, when most states permitted an unlimited number of refills for tranquilizer prescriptions, Equanil and Miltown (trade names for meprobamate) were the hottest items in many a big-city pharmacy. The situation became so alarming that states are tightening regulations, putting tranquilizers on the same non-refillable prescription basis as barbiturates.

But harried family doctors keep on prescribing tranquilizers. Said Dr. Leonard Weil, president of the Dade County Academy of General Practice: "The physician knows that if he doesn't give them someone else will . . . Only a small number of people can get psychiatric help, so a lot of emotional problems are thrown back to the family physician; he turns to tranquilizers that he might not use if he had more time." In Beverly Hills a busy psychiatrist confessed that he sometimes pops down a tranquilizer himself to prepare for the nerve-wrenching drive home from the office. Said he: "I wish the Government would subsidize slot machines for tranquilizers on every corner."

Other doctors are becoming seriously concerned at the public's widespread demand for the pills. "Could they," wondered a Boston pharmacologist, "make millions of people significantly indifferent to politics--or to their responsibilities as automobile drivers?" Says one G.P.: "Some doctors seem to prescribe a pill for almost any talkative patient--for people who aren't true neurotics. But what such people often need is precisely a chance to talk." Other doctors cautioned against prescribing the pills for every patient with an emotional upset. Concludes Baltimore Psychiatrist Frank Ayd Jr.: "Although the tranquilizers are beneficial to emotionally disturbed patients, they are not a substitute for compassion, understanding, patience, an attentive ear . . . These drugs should not be prescribed as an alternative for psychiatric therapies."

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