How Big Pharma (Successfully) Targeted Women
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, April 23, 2026 02:16
VIEWED: 456
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Two waves of addiction were prescribed by doctors and egged on by pharmaceutical marketing — orchestrated by the Sackler family — that insisted it was safe and a great idea.
Matt Bivens, M.D.
Apr 19, 2026
https://www.racket.news/p/how-big-pharma-successfully-targeted
Quote:
Part of an ongoing series about the Opioid Crisis by friend-of-Racket and ER doctor Matt Bivens, who writes on Substack at The 100 Days.
Consider this sales pitch for the sedative medication Librium®, as published in 1969 in a medical journal (and thus targeted at doctors). The advertisement featured an unsmiling young woman in a short coat, her arms full of books, who is identified as a new college student. The accompanying text listed reasons she might need to be medicated.
“Her newly stimulated intellectual curiosity may make her more sensitive to and apprehensive about unstable national and world conditions,” the ad copy intones. “Exposure to new friends and other influences may force her to reevaluate herself and her goals.”
So, she’d need daily sedation once she realized that the carpet-bombing of Vietnam was wrong?
Being lightly drugged every day would help her make friends and set goals?
She’ll be “apprehensive about unstable world conditions.” Well, tell her to get in line. Cold War-era surveys of adolescents had indeed shown that some were anxious, and cynical about adult society, due to our insane embrace of nuclear weapons — then as now, poised for hair-trigger launch to wipe out hundreds of millions of people. In college, a young person might learn more about this, and decide to work to change it.
Or instead we could just start the college student on medication, to help her get comfortable with the government’s psychopathology.
Other reasons to start Librium® were offered:
anxiety about being “in a strange environment”;
“feelings of insecurity” related to “today’s changing morality and the possible consequences of her ‘new freedom’ ” — a very 1960s-kind-of-way to nudge-wink about casual sex;
“emotional tension” from overbearing parents;
“excessive concern” about grades.
This Tuesday, the Sackler-owned-and-directed Purdue Pharma will be formally sentenced for years of illegal and dishonest work slinging opioids, activity that seeded the Opioid Crisis and made billions of dollars for the Sacklers. Purdue, the company, entered its guilty pleas more than five years ago, but the Sacklers themselves have never pleaded to anything, and instead just paid the Justice Department a little cash to go away. Here’s how they built the empire at the heart of the case:
Sedative pills of the newly discovered benzodiazepine family poured out of doctors’ offices and pharmacies in the 1960s and 1970s, in return for fabulous sums of money. Librium® had hit the market in 1960 (nine years before the advertisement referenced above), and was soon earning tens of millions of dollars a year. Valium®, its younger and more popular sister, debuted two years later. Both blockbusters, as recently reviewed here, were manufactured by Hoffman-La Roche pharmaceuticals and marketed by Arthur Sackler’s ad company.
Valium® became the first medication in history to rack up more than $100 million in annual sales. And then, even as the business world gaped in awe at the thought of a $100 million drug, Librium® was also a $100 million drug, while the saturation marketing of Valium® had sent it soaring ten times higher, and it became the first drug to earn $1 billion in annual sales.
Sackler, the ad man behind the Librium® and Valium® campaigns, had been a life-long hustler. Born in Brooklyn, the son of poor Jewish emigrants from Austria-Hungary, he was already working by age 12. He delivered newspapers and flowers to help support his family, waited tables, worked at a soda fountain. In 1926, at age 13, he was offered the position of editor of all of his high school’s publications, inNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
These types of drugs were always aimed at women. Go back further to the 19th Century, a lovely little product called laudanum. Used for aches and pains and mostly prescribed to women. Also highly addictive because it was made from opium. Always knew about that but after looking it up found it also contained morphine and codeine mixed with ethanol.
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Alcohol was the drug of choice for men, especially hard liquor.
Tobacco too. It was unseemly for women to drink and smoke so they resorted to Mkther's Little Helper and laudanum.
Religion... another opiate.
Dealing with life head-on can be difficult, and I suspect women are more prone to anxiety than men, while men are more prone to take action.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Alcohol was the drug of choice for men, especially hard liquor.
Tobacco too. It was unseemly for women to drink and smoke so they resorted to Mkther's Little Helper and laudanum.
Religion... another opiate.
Dealing with life head-on can be difficult, and I suspect women are more prone to anxiety than men, while men are more prone to take action.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Spare us your idiotic opinions. Your logic gave us Trump. Have you heard? He broke the Middle East in a way the world can't fix.
T
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Stay on topic, Theodore.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Stay on topic, Theodore.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Oh, THUGR is just butt- hurt bc he's been wrong so often.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Stay on topic, Theodore.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Oh, THUGR is just butt- hurt bc he's been wrong so often.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Really, like what?
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Stay on topic, Theodore.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Oh, THUGR is just butt- hurt bc he's been wrong so often.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Really, like what?
T
Like I haven't pointed it out many times?
Take some time to think about it.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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