Valium’s 50th birthday: little to celebrate

A recent report published by the charity MIND – which paints a troubling, and important portrait of Britons driven to alcohol, cigarettes and prescription medication to differing extents by the stress of working-life – makes it a prescient moment to cast the mind back to a series of very strange goings-on.

The time was the late 1950s, the place a hospital canteen in the North of England. Perhaps pickings in that week’s British Medical Journal had been lean – or patients that day exasperating – because the topic of conversation was a newspaper article about a Swiss circus-master who had found a drug to calm his tigers.

A series of regrettable decisions – which still piece together to make faint sense, like fragments of an argument remembered after a long lunch – prompted one young doctor to phone the drug’s manufacturer. His offer was to test the compound, and its predecessor, on the then unwitting inhabitants of Sheffield.