When people took sleeping pills back in the 1930s and 1940s, what were they made of?
Barbiturates are a class of drugs that have been around since the mid-1800s and are classified as sedative/hypnotics. They were really the only sleeping pills around until Librium was released in 1957. Librium was the first of many drugs classified as benzodiazepines. The benzodiazepines were (and remain) more popular than barbiturates because they’re more forgiving dosage-wise (a barbiturate overdose can easily be fatal, where you have to try to OD on a benzodiazepine) and because they’re less prone to be abused. Benzodiazepines include Valium, Ativan, Xanax, Klonopin… While barbiturates have a pretty specific use (they put people to sleep), the benzodiazepines are also used to treat anxiety disorders, some with particularly short half-lives are used as anesthesia, some have muscle relaxant properties, and some are excellent anticonvulsants (to be fair, there’s one barbiturate also used for this purpose). Barbiturates are horribly addictive, and while a person on Valium will eventua
Thank goodness most of them have dropped out of use, or been prohibited, nowadays. They weren’t so much ‘sleeping pills’ and more like severe bangs to the head; addictive, physically and psychologically, so that people who took them were wandering like zombies in the daytime and then needed more at night as their effectiveness decreased; they were highly poisonous and therefore easy to overdose -deliberately or accidentally; and were very likely to have unpleasant interactions with any other medication the patient might be taking. And the more natural and far less dangerous remedies for mild sleeplessness, such as valerian, were largely ignored. If you ever watched the movie Tom and Viv – the story of T S Eliot and his first wife, Vivien – you’ll see a pretty good example of how easy it was to obtain these and other substances and the damage they did to an already damaged woman.
