Taming the Tiger: Benzodiazepine Dependency. It’s Still With Us.
Jackie is just speeding away
Thought she was James Dean for a day
Then I guess she had to crash
Valium would’ve helped that bash.
Lou Reed, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ from Transformer, 1972.
In October 1993, Australian feminist and social activist, Beatrice Faust, published Benzo Junkie: More Than a Case History, which commences with an account of her dependency on benzodiazepine tranquillisers in the 1980s.[i] From her miserable experience with this drug family, she widens the discussion considerably to launch a sustained assault on pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession for their advocacy of drugs which result in patients being damaged, getting hooked and suffering the horrors of withdrawal.
Faust’s work attracted some attention, but not a huge amount, at the time of its appearance. The Canberra Times published an interview with the author by Sally Hopman on the eve of the book’s publication, in which she wrote:
Beatrice Faust has been through hell. The only difference between her experience and probably thousands of other women, is that she has spoken out in what can only be described as brutal honesty.
There was a poignant letter in the same paper from a fellow sufferer, and some sparse offerings elsewhere, but little broader discussion?.[ii] The best review I could find was by Ian Freckleton in the Alternative Law Journal. He pointed out that Benzo Junkie wanders from its core interest – benzodiazepine addiction – to just about every mishap in medical treatment Faust can think of, including the Dalkon Shield and thalidomide:
And yet, the subject that Faust addresses is important and her courage in revealing so many personal details about her war with benzodiazepine dependence undeniable . . . Her dependence on Ativan and the doctor-induced dependence of so many like her . . . are an indictment of the doctors who prescribe them, the companies which market them and of the medical profession generally. Faust’s grievances deserve to be heard and her call for better community education, improved medical practitioner training, greater preparedness by patients to sue pharmaceutical companies and government recognition of benzodiazepines as addictive substances deserves publicity and appropriate response. [iii]
In this article I use Faust as a starting point for what I call an historical aide memoire, reminding readers that issues associated with long-term use of benzodiazepines (BDZ) are still present, in Australia and elsewhere, despite increased community awareness of potential abuse. Faust’s three main targets were Big Pharma, the medical profession and regulatory authorities. Yet in 2025 we are confronted with serious health problems arising from patients being prescribed drugs such as Valium and Xanax for ongoing anxiety and tension. And such prescription is totally above board, and at the same time beneficial.
We commence with a brief account of the synthesis of benzodiazepines and their spectacular entrance into the market. In 1957 researchers at the Swiss pharmaceutical company, Hoffman-La Roche (not well known for its ethical approach to profit), discovered a sedative they named Librium. The title of this opinion piece comes from an article by a British newspaper, which I have been unable to identify, published at the time that Librium’s efficacy was being tested in the United States, when the new drug being administered to leopards, lions and tigers at San Diego Zoo. The headline of the cretinous piece reads ‘The Drug That Tames Tigers – What will it do for Nervous Women?’[iv] In the early sixties Librium was approved by regulators in the United States.
Better was to come. Hoffman-La Roche came up with a BZD more powerful than Librium, and this was Valium. America was a vast market with people desperate for relief from anxiety, tension, agitation and insomnia. Then Xanax was developed in the United States in 1971. A year later came Mogadon, which was the nickname of one of my lecturers when I was an undergraduate because their classes sent people to sleep. In 1977 Lorazepam, sold as Ativan, amongst other brand names, entered the market.[v] That drug was the one that caught Beatrice Faust in its net.
In The Pursuit of Oblivion, Richard Davenport-Hines argues that:
Such drugs were intended to improve the lives of people who were finding it difficult to function, or to maintain stability in their behaviour. Users of anti-depressants and sedatives might be pitied, teased or despised; their habits were often thought to be evidence of a cultural malaise. But although these prescription drugs were sometimes used, and despite their users often seeming emotionally importunate, or socially disruptive, they were not the targets of hostility, ostracism or criminal sanction.
It was different with another breakthrough of Swiss psychopharmacology.
Which was LSD.[vi]
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when concerns mounted about excessive drug use, (especially in the First World), a distinction was often drawn in official circles between hallucinogens (which were BAD) and tranquillisers and sedatives which, if ‘occasionally’ abused, still offered socially acceptable solutions to common mental issues. This distinction was unsurprisingly ‘pushed’ by those drug companies who were creaming money off psycho-pharmacy. As a prominent British Conservative politician said in 1970:
‘No one can doubt that medical props for sleepless adults or hard-pressed housewives represent quite a different problem from that embodied in this cult for mood-changing, self-manifesting drugs, the hallucinogens.’[vii]
This demarcation was formally enshrined by the United Nations conference on psychotropic drugs in Vienna in 1971. It is a classic case study of drug companies nobbling effective regulation of dangerous substances. The historical role of Big Pharma in manipulating research results, hiding test disasters, and influencing the medical profession is brilliantly described by Ben Goldacre in his 2008 publication, Bad Science. Since 2008 new drugs have appeared, but the malpractice and immorality Goldacre describes remain. They wear new suits, but their smiles are the same.[viii]
Ravers on acid were bad and were to be controlled, those dependent on Valium could be safely pitied or ignored.[ix] However, they could be your wife. Or your mother. Ask the Rolling Stones. Their song, ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, appeared in 1966, and though one might raise an eyebrow at Brian Jones and Keith Richards slagging off others for excessive use of drugs, it displays an early awareness of the deleterious effects of Valium and the like. It could also be read as a sexist slur that weak women reach out for those soothing tablets. Just two verses.
Rolling Stones, ‘Mother’s Little Helper’
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day[x]
I asked my wife to comment on the (extremely catchy) song. She asked, is it empathy with the ‘plight’ of women in the 1960s, or is denigrating? the domestic role of women perceived as grey, pointless and unappreciated? Is it a skewed comment on drug taking – boring ‘survival’ drugs versus edgy hip party drugs and therefore hypocritical? We agreed that the lyrics frame this sort of drug dependence as specifically a woman’s problem.
Were the benzos targeted at women? Certainly, early advertisements and the media saw women as ‘naturally’ prone to anxiety and stress. The claim that women comprised the majority of victims of benzo oversell lingered, drawing on historical perceptions of women as innately hysterical and later, neurotic, the weaker sex, in other words. An examination of visual advertising when BZDs were first being stacked on pharmacy shelves shows that women still needed a salve for being the second sex, and a salve that came with the blessing of modern science.
World-wide the use of benzodiazepines has fallen from unprecedented highs due to the introduction of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), including the notorious Prozac, which have to a significant extent replaced earlier drugs in the frontline treatment of obstinate depression. By 2003 those working in the addiction field in Australia were concerned that doctors were assuming BDZ problems had ‘disappeared’, even though nearly six million prescriptions were issued for that family of drugs in the previous year.[xi] But benzos don’t gather dust in pharmacy storerooms, and as Faust’s recent biographer, Judith Brett reminds us in the last paragraph of the chapter she devotes to Benzo Junkie, BZD dependency issues have not gone away. Consider Xanax which was, pre-COVID at least, the subject of considerable debate about its alleged overuse. It was yet another drug that was labelled a ‘happy pill’. Referring to the assiduous work of journalist, Amber Schulz, and the work of Reconnexion, Australia’s only ‘treatment centre’ for benzodiazepine dependency, Brett reminds us of Beatrice Faust’s role in alerting people to the need to be vigilant when prescribed medical treatments.[xii]
In passing, I think ‘happy pills’ is a term to avoid for the most part, especially in academic writing. Its connotations are unpleasant and convey implications of weakness on the part of those taking the medication, or possibly that they are not even ill in the first place. We see unhelpful comments, such as those put forth by Robert F. Kennedy Junior, US Secretary of Health and Human Services at his Congressional confirmation hearing, that ‘some people have a harder time coming off antidepressants than they do coming off heroin.’[xiii] Drugs de jour, especially in the area of mental health, can soon become the targets of widespread condemnation – some of it sound, much of it, as we see above, based on questionable social attitudes.
One of the problems with benzodiazepine usage, as with any branch of legal psychopharmacology, is that benzodiazepines have improved lives, have saved lives and may continue to do so. Yet as Faust showed us, for many they may have the opposite effect. From my personal experience of Valium, BDZ usage can be seen as a relationship, and like any relationship it may turn sour. Always ask your doctor questions.
[i]Beatrice Faust, Benzo Junkie: More Than a Case History, Penguin, Melbourne, 1993. I deliberately use the term ‘dependency’ here rather than ‘addiction’ to emphasise that in the situations Faust is analysing, getting hooked was due to perfectly legal medical prescriptions. See https://worldbenzoday/books
[ii] Sally Hopman, interview with Beatrice Faust, Canberra Times, 10 October 1993, p. 21; Canberra Times, Wednesday 13 October 1993, p. 12.
[iii] Ian Freckelton, review of Benzo Junkie, Alternative Law Journal, Vol. 19, No 3, June 1994, pp.148-149.
[iv] Davenport-Hines, p. 259.
[v] Richard Davenport-Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Social History of Drugs, Phoenix, London, 2002, p. 259.
[vi] Davenport-Hines, p. 260.
[vii] Davenport-Hines, pp.270-272.
[viii] Ben Goldacre, ‘Is Mainstream Medicine Evil’, in Bad Science, Fourth Estate, London, 2009, pp. 198-223.
[ix] The distinction was weakened in subsequent years, thank God. Davenport-Hines, pp. 271-272.
[x] ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, 1966, copyright Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
[xi] Julie-Anne Davies, ‘Accidental Addicts’, Age, 16 June 2003.
[xii] Judith Brett, Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism and Body Politics, Text, Melbourne, 2025, pp. 187-197. reconnexion.org.au, accessed 4 October 2025.
[xiii] Colin Davidson, ‘Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says antidepressants are harder to quit than heroin – is he right?’, The Conversation, 15 February 2025. He was talking specifically about SSRI antidepressants for which see later in my article.
