Valium had many ancestors

For thousands of years, humans have sipped, swallowed and chewed endless remedies to soothe frayed nerves: fermented ales in medieval Europe, coca tea and tobacco in the ancient Americas, and kava kava concoctions in the South Pacific, to name a few. For the last century or so, with varied success, researchers have tried to perfect the packaging of anxiety relief into a simple little pill.

In the 1800s in the U.S. and Europe, an apparent epidemic of neurasthenia, or "weakness of the nerves," was attributed by doctors to the stresses of fast-paced, modern, urban living. (It was, after all, the era of the steam engine.) At the bedside, doctors prescribed bromide salts (to replace lost salts thought to be at the root of over-excited nerves), paraldehyde (which induced sleep -- and bad breath), and often even opiates. Meanwhile in the lab, doctors tried to come up with something better.

Around 1900, German scientists working for the drug company Bayer synthesized the first synthetic barbiturate sedative. Soon barbiturates were being used to treat seizures in epileptics and to calm troubled, shellshocked soldiers.

But treating anxiety with barbiturates was a bit like pushing a tack into a wall with a sledgehammer. Barbiturates depressed the entire nervous system, slowed thinking, impaired movement and induced sleep. They came with a high risk of dependence and were easy to overdose on -- all of which inspired research into gentler alternatives.

The first of the gentler sedatives -- the so-called minor tranquilizers -- was developed in the early '50s by a New Jersey drug firm, Wallace Laboratories. The power of the drug, named Miltown (Wallace was fond of naming drugs for nearby Jersey towns), was demonstrated in experiments on monkeys: On barbiturates, the primates were unconscious; undrugged, they were their wild selves; on Miltown, they were calm but awake.

Demand for Miltown was unexpected and unprecedented. Millions of Americans begged their doctors for prescriptions. By 1957, a prescription for Miltown was filled an average of every second in the U.S.

Suburbs became the site for Miltown parties, cocktails were named for the pill (a Miltown replaced the olive in a Miltini) and high-end jewelers designed rings with compartments to hold the "tranks." The "peace pills" were particularly popular in Hollywood, and television host Milton Berle joked on-air (and uncompensated by Wallace) that he was considering changing his name to Miltown.