Mercury for teething, opium for crying, what other fun things did we feed babies back then?
Lead for smooth drying and anti-knocking :agony-deep:
What was that one insanely bad birth defect drug in the USA?
Ah, reminds me of my favorite scene from a criminally underappreciated film, Brain Candy. In this scene, Big Pharma researchers are being interviewed to see whose projects will be cut.
BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST: Well, I’ve been working on a thing. It’s, uh, sorta like Stummies.
DON: Go on. I like what I hear.
BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST: It’s exactly like Stummies.
DON: And the twist is?
BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST: It’s a much bigger pill.
DON: I like it a lot. Is it ready for production?
BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST: Yes sir, it’s ready to go.
DON: Yeah, have there been any side effects?
BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST Yes sir, a few side effects.
NATALIE: Well that’s OK. As long as there’s no flipper babies, right Don?
BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST: Well…there have been a few flipper babies.
(cuts to being dragged out by security)
BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST: Aaaaah! It was only a couple of flipper babies!
Thalidomide was famously never approved by the FDA, and is used as the main evidence for why the FDA requires entirely separate trials before any product is allowed to be sold in the US. When I worked at a pharma company, we were required to have trial results dating back almost a decade before we were allowed in the US, and even then we were apparently not entirely in the clear. However it did lead to the wildest party in company history when we got our clearance for sale in both the US and CHina within a couple of weeks of each other.
These poisons were only used in the west. The rest of the world wasn’t affected, which explains a lot.
