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Aldous Huxley Foresaw America’s Pill-Popping Addiction with Eerie Accuracy ‹ Literary Hub

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While it would have been completely unthinkable for Mike and Carol Brady to light up a joint or get rip-roaring drunk on screen, the very first episode of the first season of The Brady Bunch (1969) unproblematically opens with the couple, the very paragons of middle-American morality, casually popping pills on their wedding night: taking a couple tranquilizers to calm their prenuptial jitters. When Mike complains to Carol that he is nervous about their impending ceremony, she immediately replies that he should just take a tranquilizer, presumably a Valium (diazepam). Then when he responds that he has already taken one, she nonchalantly tells him to just take a second. This apparent ease with which Americans have come to accept Valium—along with its fellow benzodiazepines, from Librium (chlordiazepoxide) and Klonopin (clonazepam) to Ativan (lorazepam) and Xanax (alprazolam)—is comically illustrated in Alan J. Pakula’s Starting Over (1979). When Phil Potter (Burt Reynolds) has a panic at

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