VALIUM Drug has been relaxing folks for 40 years

Chemist remembers the creation of Valium 40 years ago.
NUTLEY, N.J. (AP) -- Mother's little helper is not so little anymore.
Valium, the drug that revolutionized the treatment of anxiety and became a cultural icon, is 40 years old this year.
The drug owes its success to the stubborn streak of chemist Leo Sternbach, who refused to quit after his boss at Hoffmann-LaRoche ended a project to develop a tranquilizer to compete with a rival company's drug.
Sternbach tested one last version and in just a day, he got the results: The compound made animals relaxed and limp.
Sternbach had made the discovery that eventually led to Valium. It was approved for use in 1963 and became the country's most prescribed drug from 1969 to 1982.
"It had no unpleasant side effects. It gave you a feeling of well-being," Sternbach, now 95, said recently at Hoffmann-LaRoche's headquarters in Nutley.
"Only when the sales figures came in, then I realized how important it was."
Hoffmann-La Roche sold nearly 2.3 billion pills stamped with the trademark "V" at its 1978 peak.
Cultural icon
While its name was derived from the Latin word for being strong, Valium soon picked up nicknames: "Executive Excedrin," for its use by the corporate jet set, and "Mother's Little Helper," the title of a classic Rolling Stones tune about an overstressed housewife who "goes running for the shelter of a mother's little helper."
Valium also was referred to as a "doll" -- one of the pills popped by female characters in novelist Jacqueline Susann's racy 1966 best-seller "Valley of the Dolls." Most of the prescriptions were written by family doctors rather than psychiatrists, and the majority of users were women.
"It was chic," said Dr. Norman Sussman, professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. "Everyone was on it and talking about it" in an era of anxiety called the rat race.
Named one of the 25 most influential Americans of the 20th century by U.S. News & amp; World Report, Sternbach was born in Croatia and began his career in 1940 at Roche's headquarters in Switzerland after earning a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at University of Krakow in Poland.
Fearing Nazis would occupy Switzerland, the company sent its Jewish scientists to the United States. Sternbach fled June 22, 1941, with his new bride Herta, his landlady's daughter.
"We came with only our clothes," she recalled.