These were too strong a sleeping pill to be safe for driving, if you stayed awake or didn't wait for it to wear off all the way the next day. You could feel it was kind of a goofy intoxicant, but if you took one and laid down you slept like a log.
I think there were some early incidents that would keep it from becoming a legitimate blockbuster, other sleep aids became more widespread and Quaaludes ended up more for retired people who didn't drive or didn't drive as much any more.
Naturally the condos of South Florida were packed with those type residents like nowhere else.
Mostly the old folks would take the first one and the next day feel like it was more potent than they thought. They were potent and most people wouldn't really need one the next night even if they took it for insomnia the night before.
These patients weren't taking them every night, just the opposite, only occasionally, if ever again when they felt like they really needed it.
One day, after a few years, some wild high-school kid with nothing else but pure rebelliousness and unruly behavior in mind, who will take any pill they find, finds out that grandma has a forgotten bottle in the medicine cabinet with 99 of them still in it.
Tries it and likes it. Tells his friends.
Within a few weeks hundreds of kids were finding vast repositories, selling them for $1 each and that's when they first started flying off the shelf.
They probably cost about $6 a 100 for the prescription at the pharmacy, in 1970's dollars.
Interestingly, they became a blockbuster only after it was no longer legitimate.
This is also when pharma started to jack up their prices on a per-pill basis, before that the medical world was still like it really had never crossed their mind until then.
For a number of years afterward new "patients" started preferring them too, on the black market a renewed prescription yielded over 10x the money the drug company made on the same bottle. Pharma was just cringing about it until they eventually got their skyrocketing underway. Still caught them again with opiates, especially Oxycontin.
I think there were some early incidents that would keep it from becoming a legitimate blockbuster, other sleep aids became more widespread and Quaaludes ended up more for retired people who didn't drive or didn't drive as much any more.
Naturally the condos of South Florida were packed with those type residents like nowhere else.
Mostly the old folks would take the first one and the next day feel like it was more potent than they thought. They were potent and most people wouldn't really need one the next night even if they took it for insomnia the night before.
These patients weren't taking them every night, just the opposite, only occasionally, if ever again when they felt like they really needed it.
One day, after a few years, some wild high-school kid with nothing else but pure rebelliousness and unruly behavior in mind, who will take any pill they find, finds out that grandma has a forgotten bottle in the medicine cabinet with 99 of them still in it.
Tries it and likes it. Tells his friends.
Within a few weeks hundreds of kids were finding vast repositories, selling them for $1 each and that's when they first started flying off the shelf.
They probably cost about $6 a 100 for the prescription at the pharmacy, in 1970's dollars.
Interestingly, they became a blockbuster only after it was no longer legitimate.
This is also when pharma started to jack up their prices on a per-pill basis, before that the medical world was still like it really had never crossed their mind until then.
For a number of years afterward new "patients" started preferring them too, on the black market a renewed prescription yielded over 10x the money the drug company made on the same bottle. Pharma was just cringing about it until they eventually got their skyrocketing underway. Still caught them again with opiates, especially Oxycontin.