Tranquillisers for the people
鈥淚t is impossible to estimate the number of people in the United States today who are living in a state of permanent tranquillity.鈥� So runs a recent newspaper report.
The quantity of tranquillisers consumed in the US and in the UK is beginning to worry medical people on both sides of the Atlantic. According to the Health News Institute, 35 million prescriptions for tranquillisers will be written in the US this year. In the state of Maryland alone, 11 per cent of its drug bill last year was for tranquillisers. The drugs, best known of which are chlorpromazine, reserpine and meprobamate, are being widely used in the treatment of psychiatric disorders both in hospitals and in general medical practice.
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Among the questions which arise when treatment of this sort is considered is whether it is safe for persons to go about their ordinary duties under the influence of tranquillisers. Should they, for example, drive cars? Or would they, perhaps, display a pathological lack of anxiety about red traffic lights? Another problem concerns their administration to children. It has been shown in animal tests, for example, that the indelible permanent attachment that offspring can make to their mother from the day they are born can be removed by taking meprobamate.
On the credit side there is much to be said for tranquillisers. In one year 30,000 psychiatric hospital patients in New York state were given a course of chlorpromazine or reserpine. At the end of this time the hospital population had fallen by 452, in contrast to the average increase of 2000 for each year over the previous decade. It was the most abrupt recorded fall in the hospital population since 1909. Bearing this in mind, any ill effects of these drugs would need to be very real to counteract such an impressive achievement.
From The 快猫短视频, 3 October 1957