In the mid-1950s so-called wonder drugs arrived from Europe. And within a few years of their introduction to the United States, they were everywhere in public and private practice. Thorazine, the brand name for the drug chlorpromazine, was first synthesized by the Rhone-Poulenc labs in France in 1950. In 1952, the first American clinical trials began. By 1956, more than three thousand patients in Maryland’s system were being treated with the “new drugs,” and more than four million Americans were using them, too. Not long after Thorazine, other antipsychotics and antidepressants were pumped out
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