What kind of pills are dolls

Valley of the Dolls soon was synonymous with sin and substance abuse in show business. The book details the lives of three women working in Hollywood and New York and their destructive addiction to prescription pills, or "dolls"—a reference to how they cling to the drugs, the way a child might become inseparable from a cherished toy doll. The watershed work has since entered the popular lexicon, shorthand for the seemingly glamorous destruction of drug addiction.

Since its publication 50 years ago, Valley of the Dolls has enjoyed a lasting cult appeal, conjuring up images of excess, salacious substance abuse, and the sultry Sharon Tate, who plays Jennifer North in the novel's bad-but-now-camp film adaption. What has mostly determined its literary and cultural legacy has been the book's lowbrow, "trashy" reputation—bad writing, glossy cover, scandalous content.

Re-reading the book today, however, elicits a more feminist interpretation: The "dolls" seem less like destructive forces and more like symbols of the female protagonists' search for self-determination, in whatever limited forms it could take in the late 60s. In many ways, after all, the decade was all about drugs.

They numbed a country witnessing mass carnage in Vietnam, a grueling fight for civil rights, political assassinations, and a sexual awakening. The seeds of the second-wave feminist movement were being sewn, and disillusionment with the American cultural landscape grew. Some gravitated to the alternative realities of acid; others sourced numbness in the "deadening" lull of prescription "dolls"—mostly barbiturates and sleeping pills, though the weight-loss drug Dexedrine also makes an appearance—as the women of Susann's world did.

But the illicit drugs of the s were not all about an attempt to block out the world. In , the FDA approved the contraceptive pill; the Supreme Court legalized it for married women across the country in and for unmarried women in By Seema Yasmin. Every decade has its highs and lows. In the s, it was the original mother's little helper, Benzedrine; the '50s were soothed by Miltown; the '60s and '70s were laced with Librium and Valium; there was Prozac in the '90s; Ritalin and Adderall in the s; and these days, everyone from techies to soldiers is popping modafinil.

Americans swallow pills to fix problems. Miltown, a tranquilizer used to relieve anxiety, was released in By , one in 20 Americans had used the drug. It wasn't the only popular tranquilizer at the time. By the s, approximately million prescriptions a year for tranquilizers were being written in the U.

By then, Librium, the prototypical benzodiazepine, was in vogue. But like its cousin Valium, Librium fell out of fashion as people learned that it was highly addictive. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. I would say Jennifer ended up being my favorite section to read, but was sad they were cut short… The three girls briefly live together when they are between marriages and each finds solace and destruction when using dolls.

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