Matt Taibbi uncovers a chilling continuity in American public health: the same corporate playbook that turned tranquilizers into a cultural crutch in the 1960s now fuels the opioid devastation. By dissecting a 1969 advertisement for Librium, Taibbi reveals how the pharmaceutical industry didn't just treat illness—it manufactured anxiety to sell a cure, a strategy that directly paved the way for today's crisis.
The Manufacturing of Anxiety
Taibbi's piece opens with a striking artifact: a medical journal ad from 1969 targeting college women. The ad suggests that a student's "newly stimulated intellectual curiosity" regarding the Vietnam War or her own "changing morality" are medical conditions requiring daily sedation. Taibbi notes the absurdity of the pitch, asking, "So, she'd need daily sedation once she realized that the carpet-bombing of Vietnam was wrong?" This framing is powerful because it exposes how the industry pathologized legitimate political and social dissent. The argument suggests that the drug wasn't a solution to a chemical imbalance, but a tool to make citizens "comfortable with the government's psychopathology."
The historical context Taibbi provides is essential. He draws a direct line from the marketing of benzodiazepines like Librium and Valium to the later opioid epidemic. He writes, "It's an intriguing counterfactual to consider that, if not for the revenues (and the shining example) generated by sales of addictive Valium, the Sacklers might never have bought Purdue and launched OxyContin." This connection is the piece's most vital insight. It reframes the opioid crisis not as an isolated failure of regulation, but as the inevitable result of a business model perfected decades earlier. The Sackler family, having amassed billions through Arthur Sackler's aggressive marketing of Valium, simply applied the same "pathological, market-rewarded behavior" to opioids when the benzodiazepine patents expired.
One pathological, market-rewarded behavior amasses resources and know-how to launch another.
Critics might argue that comparing the addiction potential of benzodiazepines to opioids oversimplifies the medical necessity of pain management. However, Taibbi's focus is not on the pharmacology but on the marketing strategy: the insistence that these drugs were non-addictive, followed by the deflection of blame onto the patient's "addictive personality." This pattern, he notes, was identical in both eras.
The Sackler Hustle and the Culture of Sedation
Taibbi delves into the biography of Arthur Sackler, portraying him not as a doctor, but as a "life-long hustler" who treated medicine as a sales channel. He describes how Sackler, starting as a teenager selling ads for school publications, "always negotiated a commission on sales." This background explains the relentless drive behind the marketing campaigns. Taibbi writes, "Sackler, the ad man behind the Librium and Valium campaigns, had been a life-long hustler... He used the resulting fabulous wealth to, among other things, purchase a small pharmaceutical company that would later become Purdue Pharma."
The article highlights how these drugs became so ubiquitous they entered the cultural lexicon. Taibbi points to a 1969 episode of The Brady Bunch where a character suggests taking a tranquilizer for wedding jitters, noting, "Marriage and college are apparently both something to get through on drugs." This pop culture reference underscores the normalization of sedation. The New York Times reported in 1974 that millions of Americans kept a tranquilizer "at hand to swallow in periods of stress," with the drug becoming so common that "many Americans are born and die with Valium in their bodies."
Taibbi contrasts this American epidemic with the Soviet Union, where similar sedatives existed but were never marketed for widespread daily use. He asks, "How interesting that the Soviets discovered similar sedatives at the exact same moment in history as the Americans, but without an ensuing national addiction crisis." This comparison effectively isolates the variable: it wasn't the drug itself, but the "free market-steered medical decision-making" that drove the crisis. The industry created a diagnosis of "psychic tension"—a vague term Taibbi calls a "corollary" to the advertising campaign—to justify prescribing high doses to anyone with a headache or stress.
In the self-styled Free World, the newly-discovered benzodiazepine chemicals would be gussied up with attractive names and then sold, sold, sold.
The ads themselves, which Taibbi describes as "wild," used pseudo-scientific diagrams to suggest that women's social isolation or family dynamics were medical emergencies solvable only by pills. One ad depicted a widow's "interpersonal relationships, sociometrically diagrammed," concluding that her "hypochondriasis" was a way to "disown her conflicts" and prescribing a shockingly high dose of diazepam. This framing reveals a deep misogyny in the industry's approach, targeting women's emotional lives as a market opportunity.
Bottom Line
Taibbi's strongest argument is the unbroken lineage of corporate malfeasance from the benzodiazepine craze to the opioid crisis, proving that the Sackler empire was built on a foundation of manufactured addiction. The piece's greatest vulnerability is its heavy reliance on the Sackler narrative, which, while accurate, risks overshadowing the broader regulatory failures of the FDA and the complicity of the medical establishment that allowed these campaigns to flourish. Readers should watch for how this historical pattern repeats in current pharmaceutical marketing, particularly regarding new classes of sedatives and painkillers.