Valium (diazepam)
Acrylic on canvas
14” x 18”
2010
$400
If all we knew were its vital statistics, we would pass over Valium with dull recognition: Anti-anxiety, sedative, hypnotic, amnesiac, anticonvulsant, muscle relaxant, habit-forming, tolerance, addiction, abuse, dependence, trafficking, DEA, schedule IV, withdrawal, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, seizures and suicide. Valium is just another sleeping pill, no different in many ways from the Quaaludes or Seconals or Placidyls of years past.
But Valium is big. When Roche debuted it in 1963, it put their name on the map. For thirteen years, Valium was the best-selling pharmaceutical in America, grossing upwards of half a trillion dollars a year. In 1975, fifteen percent of America was taking a benzodiazepine, and Valium led the way, with 1.5 million addicts among the US population. All this, because Valium was an improvement on what had come before in two ways.
Valium is almost eerily non-toxic. Consumers were used to thinking of sleeping pills as deadly — how many starlets died in the 1950’s alone from barbiturate overdoses? Suicidal patients, intending the same death, spent the 60’s and 70’s overdosing on Valium, but to little effect. After taking hundreds of pills, and sleeping for several days straight, they would often wake up, little the worse for wear. Judy Garland, of all people, succeeded in dying in 1969 of a Valium overdose, but it clearly took her a lot of practice.
At the same time, Valium was among the first drugs to show an ability to dim anxiety without causing debilitating sleepiness, by acting selectively at benzodiazepine receptors to increase brain levels of GABA, the major inhibitory neurotransmitter. Valium does put patients to sleep, but much less so than meprobamate or barbiturates, and patients soon develop tolerance to the drowsiness. By the 1960’s, the amount of free-floating anxiety in the world was too great to be held back any longer, and Valium was born.
These molecules are rendered as space-filling models, in a natural, low-energy conformation, and displayed from an angle that shows off as much of their structure as possible. The atoms are color-coded, with carbon being black, hydrogen white, oxygen red, nitrogen blue, and chlorine green. They are painted in artist-quality acrylics, on gessoed canvas
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