Please Mr. Pharmacist: The New Brand of Drug Song

By Rob Mitchum | 3.12.07

The history of recreational drug use in the 20th century can be read in the lyric sheets and sonic signatures of popular music, from the opiate cloud over the jazz age, to the amphetamine-juiced birth of rock n’ roll, to the psychedelic fuel of rave culture. Music has served as a newscast of the rise and fall of various drug trends, the lyrics and sound reflecting the In Crowd’s current substance of choice, either advertising its joys and benefits or warning of its dark side. For decades, songs hyped the potential of various drugs for mind expansion, the famous Aldous Huxley beat about opening new doors of perception in one’s sensory experience, with drugs as the tool of choice to “turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.”

Lately, however, drug culture has made a significant shift, progressing like an up-and-coming band from the youth-dominated underground to the wide-demographic, commercialized mainstream. Even the term “drug” has changed in meaning; there used to be an easy distinction between “drugs,” those seductive and evil things that will ruin your life, and “medicine,” what you take for a cold or a hangover. Nowadays, the drug business isn’t an amorphous boogeyman the government is fighting an endless and expensive war against; rather, it’s one of the largest industries in the world.

Thus far in the 21st century, the cutting-edge intoxicant class has not been uppers or downers or opiates or psychedelics, but the drugs you pick up at your local Walgreen’s. DARE ads have started to focus their scare-mongering on the abuse of prescription drugs, meaning that the trend has been going for at least five years now – hell, I remember other high school kids trying to snort their Ritalin in the mid-1990s. With the flood of medications on the market to help with everything from depression to impotence, it was only a matter of time before people began to devise recreational off-label use for all these powerful substances, and songs about abusing cough syrup, Vicodin, and OxyContin were soon to follow.

But perhaps an even more interesting phenomenon is the increasing frequency of songs about legitimate use of pharmaceuticals. Depression has kept pace with drugs on the song-topic charts, particularly in the arena of alternative/indie rock, where mood disorders have long been the muse for many a mopey artist. With depression, and mental illness in general, becoming less taboo among younger generations, and with prescription-drug options for treatment of depression becoming increasingly common, it’s logical that the language of brain physiology and pharmaceutical remedies would gradually start to infiltrate lyrics. Recent albums from Cloud Cult and Of Montreal face these issues directly and unflinchingly, dissonantly placing reflections on brain function and anti-depressants into catchy, infectious pop.

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Legal drugs have been making rare appearances throughout the history of rock n’ roll – even back to its earliest days. However, the early rock opinion toward prescription medication was less than favorable, perhaps best represented by the Rolling Stones’ 1966 song “Mother’s Little Helper”. By castigating a middle-aged protagonist for popping Valium pills like candy to get through the day and forget the horrifying “drag” of getting old, the Stones appear somewhat oblivious to their own hypocrisy; after all, within the year, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards were all arrested for drug possession. This demarcation between drugs illegal and legal reflected the spirit of the time, as hip youngsters were expected to experiment with pot and LSD while their mothers were supposed to deal with their boredom via non-pharmaceutical means, like, you know, cooking and cleaning.

The dismissal of prescription drugs in “Mother’s Little Helper” also ignored the component of the 60s drug scene, in England especially, that was reliant upon drugs developed and intended for medical use. Before moving on to “harder” drugs like heroin and LSD, many musicians first experience with illicit substances came in the form of uppers or downers, many of which were easily available on the legal market. Amphetamine, which drove the mod scene of the early 60s, was sold under trade names like Benzedrine, Preludin, and Dexedrine and hyped as a remedy for everything from schizophrenia to night blindness. Where speed is popular, so too are downers, and sure enough the 60s were also a boom period for depressants – legal and otherwise. Valium (diazepam) was approved for use in 1963, joining the long used-and-abused barbiturates as the sedatives of choice in Britain and America. Not for nothing are many of the “pusher” songs of the 60s about quasi-legal drug dispensers like The Other Half’s “Mr. Pharmacist,” (later covered by the Fall) or the Beatles’ “Doctor Robert”.

But as hallucinogens began to capture the underground’s attention in the late 60s, doing the same drugs as your parents fell out of fashion; here the key line is the “White Rabbit” admonition, “One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small/ But the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all.” This proclamation marked the beginning of prescription drugs’ long absence from popular music. While recreational use of uppers and downers certainly didn’t go away, and speed especially played vital roles in the development of the punk and metal scenes, dropping trade names into songs was no longer common practice.

Singing songs about being blue, of course, didn’t go out of fashion either, but musicians struggling with depression in the 70s and 80s were more likely to celebrate or incorporate the psychotherapy terminology of the day. Arthur Janov’s primal therapy, the idea of making psychological process through reliving emotional pain, strongly influenced John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band period and inspired the naming of the band Tears for Fears – not to mention, duh, Primal Scream. In other songs, skepticism about the latest psychiatric techniques reigned, like the Ramones’ “Psycho Therapy” (which mentions the barbiturate Tuinal), while the imagery of mental illness became cartoon fodder for heavy metal album covers.

Beginning in the late 80s, the pharmaceutical industry began to grow at an exponential rate, on the back of wonder drugs like Zoloft, Propecia, Viagra, Xanax, Wellbutrin, and many more. Rather than the humble, utilitarian image of familiar brands of over-the-counter drugs such as aspirin and prescription medications like penicillin, these drugs came with full advertising campaigns, many marketed “direct to consumer” in endless soft-focus “ask your doctor if you need _____” magazine ads and television spots. Suddenly, people outside of the medical community became well-versed in the differences between Vioxx and Valtrex, and many pharmaceuticals began to accrue branding power in the league of stalwarts like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s; everyone now knows what the “little blue diamond” is.

No surprise then that the increasing cultural visibility of prescription drugs led to more frequent appearances of these substances in popular music. Perhaps the first big hit in this vein was Nirvana’s “Lithium”, released as a single in 1992; lithium compounds have been used to treat symptoms of manic depression since the late 19th century. While Kurt Cobain’s lyrics don’t directly address the medication (did he ever directly address anything?), they do appear to reflect the constantly shifting moods and emotions of someone suffering bipolar disorder, and the song’s popularity, solidified the connection between mental illness and element #3 in teenagers everywhere.

Since “Lithium”, scores of songs have used prescription drugs as a title or a lyric; punch one brand into AllMusic or some other search engine, and you’ll find dozens of songs, covering virtually any genre but mainly appearing in the last 10 years. As one of the first and most popular drugs in this relatively recent prescription-drug class, it’s no surprise that Prozac is the headliner in this class, lending its Eli Lilly-derived name to 110 songs. Strangely, nearly all of these songs are terrible, with luminaries like Vanilla Ice (in his rap-rock makeover guise), MxPx, the Mr. T Experience, and Dokken all using the drug to their own ends. Most misunderstand the drug’s function or purpose, and some Prozac homilies never even mention the drug, like Denali’s “Prozac”, simply going for impressionistic descriptions of the depressive state the drug is intended to treat. On the other hand, Zoloft, Pfizer’s version of the same selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class as Prozac, appears to inspire strangely humorous songs, like Ween’s psychedelic-preset commercial jingle on Quebec or the Drive-By Truckers’ old-fashioned country stomper about an over-medicated family.

Right behind antidepressants on the drug-song popularity scale are sedatives, and the undisputed champion of this class is Valium, which survived the Stones’ dismissal to remain popular for more than four decades. Diazepam (Valium’s chemical name) can also boast the strongest artist lineup of any drug I’ve searched, with strong-cred musicians like Kristin Hersh, The Old 97’s, Entrance, Karate, Joe Pernice, and Robert Pollard all dropping its name somewhere in their respective catalogs. Invariably, songs about valium are required to have a slow, sluggish beats per minute, and most are relatively accurate in depicting the drug’s effects, talking of blurry vision and pain relief.

There’s a steep falloff beyond the antidepressants and the anxiolytics, much to my surprise; I would’ve bet good money that there were at least a dozen different emo-punk bands with songs called Ritalin. The ADD drug is strangely sparse from the music world despite its recent popularity with doctors seeking to pacify restless children, I found a mention in Green Day’s plagiarist epic “Jesus of Suburbia,” and it’s of course the main character in the Foo Fighters “The Call,” but the only song of note titled “Ritalin” is by backpackers Kidz in the Hall … and the only medical brand in those lyrics is Neosporin.

Most of the above songs deal with legal, prescribed use of pharmaceuticals; it’s hard to get high off antidepressants. But there has also been a rise over the last few years in songs about recreational use of medication designed for treatment, reflecting societal trends; the 2006 edition of the annual “Monitoring the Future” survey of teenage drug use saw an increase in the abuse of prescription drugs despite decreases in most other drug classes. Vicodin is a popular pill in this regard, with Eminem (who has a tattoo of a Vicodin pill on his arm) perhaps the most frequent proponent, name-dropping the drug in several songs, including “Kill You” and “Under the Influence”. The drug has also popped up in songs by metal group Atreyu and indie songstress Terra Naomi, while El-P opts instead for the opiate-based painkiller “Oxycontin” in his two different songs of the same name.

However, the predominant hip-hop medical substance trend of late has undoubtedly been the appropriation of cough syrup, preferably the kind laced with codeine that’s only available via prescription in the U.S. Having picked up a multitude of slang names and mixture recipes, such as lean, purple drank, and sizzurp, the substance has inspired not just individual songs but arguably an entire hip-hop genre, the “chopped-and-screwed” ultra-slow remix style developed by Houston’s DJ Screw (who may have died of side effects from the drug in 2000). Three 6 Mafia’s “Sippin’ on Some Syrup” was the first song to hype the drug beyond a regional audience, and the drug combination has since popped up in songs from artists like Paul Wall and Mike Jones, many of which contain backing tracks that simulate the slow-motion effects of the substance.

If one widens the scope to beyond songs about specific prescription drugs, there’s a whole sub-genre of material; “Medication” alone has been used as a song title by Modest Mouse, Damien Jurado, Garbage, Primal Scream, Queens of the Stone Age, Son Volt, Spiritualized, and The Chocolate Watchband. It’s hard to tell whether the substances of which they speak are legal or otherwise, but a persistent theme of mental illness runs through most, from Jay Farrar’s “living on medication/wanted to slow the world down,” to Isaac Brock’s “this is the part of me that needs medication.”

Pills are also a frequent character of many drug-themed songs, though again it’s hard to tell if the capsules in question are of the pharmacist variety or of the uppers/downers type. It’s a pretty safe bet that any 60s-70s song (cf. The Who’s “I’ve Had Enough” or 20/20’s “Yellow Pills”) is referring to the kind of pills you don’t buy at the corner drug store, but recent examples from the emo side of the world are more clinical. Panic at the Disco’s “Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks” talks about “prescribed pills/ To offset the shakes/ To offset the pills/ You know you should take,” and Bright Eyes’ “Loose Leaves” mentions “prescription pills/ Well I take two a day to make my brain behave.”

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