Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe

While ad execs devised snappy campaigns for cigarettes, cars, and cosmetics, historically most prescription drugs had been generic, with no brand names and little product differentiation.

This paradigm shift toward promotion and brand differentiation was an instant success. Just a few years after Arthur initiated the Terramycin campaign, The New York Times remarked that “more and more physicians are specifying by brand or manufacturer’s name” the products to be used in filling prescriptions.

Just as women had outnumbered men in the wards of Creedmoor, it now emerged that doctors were prescribing Roche’s tranquilizers to women much more often than to men, and Arthur and his colleagues seized on this phenomenon and started to aggressively market Librium and Valium to women.

historian Andrea Tone noted in her book The Age of Anxiety, what Roche’s tranquilizers really seemed to offer was a quick fix for the problem of “being female.”